Worked example · IT · Year 10
DCF: Citizenship → Health and well-being
A secure Year 10 response, annotated so you can see which success criterion each part meets. It doubles as your answer key. Show it after pupils have finished their own audit.
| The person | Feature | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| Blind pupil, Windows laptop in every lesson. | Narrator | It is a screen reader built into Windows 11, so it is already on the school laptop with nothing to install or license. It speaks the text and describes the controls, so the pupil drives the whole machine from the keyboard. |
| Pupil with dyslexia who loses their place on long pages. | Immersive Reader | Line focus shows only one to five lines at a time, which is exactly the "losing my place" problem, and the wider text spacing and Read Aloud take the effort out of decoding. It is not a screen reader — this pupil can see the text fine. |
| Deaf pupil, four-minute video with no captions. | Live captions | Windows logo key + Ctrl + L captions any audio passing through the PC, so it works even though the video itself has no caption track. The proper fix is still for the school to caption the video, because captions on the device only help the person who knows the shortcut. |
| Grandparent with age-related sight loss. | Browser zoom | Ctrl and plus enlarges every site with no set-up and no new software, which suits someone who can read large print. A screen reader would be the wrong tool: they have usable sight, they just need it bigger. |
| Blind pupil reading on an Android phone. | TalkBack | TalkBack is the Android screen reader, so it is the phone equivalent of Narrator: the screen is read out loud and explored by touch and swipe gestures. |
| Teacher with low vision on a MacBook. | VoiceOver | VoiceOver is built into macOS and turns on with Command-F5, so there is nothing to install on a school Mac. Commands use the VoiceOver modifier, Control and Option together, or Caps Lock. |
Real features, correct platforms, and each reason explains the match instead of restating the impairment. It also refuses two wrong matches (a screen reader for someone who has usable sight). Evidences criteria 1 and 2.
| Fault on the page | WCAG principle | Who is shut out | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| The timetable is a photograph of handwriting with no alternative text, and the times appear nowhere else. | Perceivable | Anyone using a screen reader, and anyone whose images fail to load. | Type the times out as an HTML table on the page. The photograph can then stay as decoration with empty alternative text. |
| Body text at 10 pixels, grey on light grey, contrast measured at 2.1 to 1. | Perceivable | Anyone with low vision, and anyone reading outdoors in bright light. | Set the text to at least 16 pixels and darken it until the ratio is 4.5 to 1 or better, which is the WCAG level AA requirement for normal text. |
| Zoom is blocked by user-scalable=no. | Perceivable | Every phone user who pinches to enlarge text, which is most people with any sight loss. | Delete user-scalable=no, maximum-scale=1.0 from the page header. There is no good reason to stop someone zooming. |
| Three links all reading "Click here". | Understandable | Screen reader users, who often jump through a page by listing its links and hear only "Click here" three times. | Rename them so each makes sense alone: "Download the consent form", "Kit list for the Bannau walk", "Watch last year's trip video". |
| Lunch arrangements shown by red or green background colour only. | Perceivable | Colour-blind pupils, screen reader users, and anyone who prints the page in black and white. | Say it in words: two lists headed "Bring a packed lunch" and "School lunch ordered", or a "Lunch" column with the word in it. |
| The "Email the trips office" button only responds to a mouse click. | Operable | Anyone who cannot use a mouse: screen reader users, and people using a keyboard or switch device. | Use a real <button> or link element so it is reachable by Tab and fires on Enter and Space. |
Six distinct faults, correctly classified, each with a named group and a fix that a web author could act on today. Evidences criterion 3.
Mountain photograph: decorative, so the alternative text is empty — alt="". It carries no information the text does not already give, and an empty alt means a screen reader skips it silently instead of announcing "bannau dot jpg".
Timetable photograph: this one carries the only copy of the times, so it must not be left to alternative text at all. The times go on the page as text: "Coach leaves school 8.15am. Coach returns to school 5.30pm." Then the photograph gets alt="" as well.
Correctly distinguishes a decorative image from an image carrying information, and knows that essential information belongs in text, not in an alt attribute. Evidences criterion 4.
Links: "Download the Bannau Brycheiniog consent form (PDF)" · "Kit list for the Bannau Brycheiniog walk" · "Watch last year's trip video (4 minutes, captioned)".
Lunch instruction: "Lunch: if your name is in the Packed lunch list below, bring your own food. If your name is in the School lunch list, the kitchen has your order." The information is now in the words, so it survives being read aloud, printed in greyscale or seen by someone who cannot tell red from green.
Link text works out of context and the colour-only instruction is rewritten as text. Evidences criteria 3 and 4.
Every one of these six features gets used by people who are not disabled at all. Live captions are how you follow a video on a silent bus; zoom is how you read a phone with a cracked screen; Read Aloud is how you get through a long article when you are tired the night before a deadline. Designing for the pupil who is blind produces a page that is faster for everyone, and a page that fails them — times locked inside a photograph, a form that is a scan of paper — is annoying for the rest of us and impossible for them.
Links accessibility to well-being for the whole class rather than treating it as someone else's problem. Evidences criterion 5.