Read about our work to make Free UK Genealogy Accessible. We want all internet users to be able to research their family history.

Early in August, I sat beside someone who was trying to use FreeREG.  He had no sight. He was using specialist technology to have the computer read the search page and results pages out to him.  As an observer, this process was uncomfortable to watch. So much that was so obvious with sight became a hopelessly entangled muddle of odd words. A subheading, ‘information’, meant nothing without the context of the box labelled ‘First Name’ that it was next to.

Ensuring Free UK Genealogy is Accessible

We were at  The Shaw Trust  to hold an audit of FreeREG site. This was so that we could know what work was needed to make the website easily accessible to all, and more compatible with assistive technology.

I was very surprised that despite the difficulties he encountered, the tester was enthusiastic about FreeREG. He saw that accessible family history websites could allow him to take up a hobby that he could do without assistance from family and friends.

The experience of working with the Shaw Trust has made us think about things which were not in the original brief for the development of FreeREG. However, these changes will make the database better for everyone. We will be using what we learned to ensure that the whole suite of Free UK Genealogy websites are equally accessible.  The ‘free’ in our names doesn’t just mean access should be free of payment. It also means that we should be as free of other barriers as we can be.

Taking our work on Accessibility forward

For those with interest in the technical details: FreeREG is being evaluated against and brought in line with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 . In the next few months, the site should be usable by recent versions of assistive technologies. This includes JAWS (Job Access With Speech), NVDA (Non Visual Desktop Access), ZoomText, and Dragon Naturally Speaking. It should also be usable by screen magnifiers and speech recognition software found on your operating system.

Our work will also be informed by findings from our External Communications Survey.   The results show that our researchers would like to see us use different formats to get information across. This would also help to improve accessibility. We are now looking into creating ‘How To’ videos for each of our projects, and Audio Transcriptions of our web pages.