The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) sponsors the Rail Ombudsman, a free independent service that investigates unresolved complaints between passengers and participating train and station operators.
In January 2024, the ORR commissioned us to carry out research with our consumer panel into the accessibility of the Rail Ombudsman website and its other communication channels.
The ORR wanted to understand how well these were working for disabled people and older people with accessibility needs.
The project had three elements; a technical assessment against WCAG 2.2AA guidelines, web testing by our panel members and mystery shopping of the Rail Ombudsman’s other contact options including email, telephone, SMS, WhatsApp and the British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter service.
Technical assessment
WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and is a universally recognised standard for web content that meets the accessibility needs of disabled people.
An automated assessment looked at consumer-facing pages as well as the case management system used by staff.
User-testing
Our panel members were given tasks such as finding the ‘quick start’ guide, downloading it in an accessible format and submitting their complaint through the online portal.
They were surveyed on how easy they found the tasks to complete, the readability of the content and whether the language used was easy to understand.
Mystery Shopping
Our mystery shoppers had a range of impairments - such as visual impairments, hearing loss and autism spectrum disorder. For this part of the research, they were each given a complaint scenario and asked to pursue it through the range of communication channels the Rail Ombudsman offers.
Recommendations
The results of the research have led to recommendations the Rail Ombudsman to improve accessibility for disabled and older people.
These include making links to important website content as clear as possible, considering an inbuilt ‘read aloud’ function and an explanation of any complex terms.
Documents should be accessible to people using assistive technology such as screen readers and accessibility information and resources should be more clearly signposted so users can easily find them.
RiDC has also explained the findings to the supplier of their case management system, who are looking to positively respond to the recommendations.
Laura Walkerdine, Ombudsman Sponsorship Manager at ORR said:
“Following a successful tender process, ORR worked with RiDC to test the contact channels and accessibility of the Rail Ombudsman. This was so that areas for potential improvement could be identified. The project concluded towards the end of April 2024 with the report being published on 9 July 2024."
"We are now working with the Rail Ombudsman on continuous improvement plans. The RiDC research and report has been a key consideration in these plans.”
