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Required content

Ensure your service includes all legally required content.

Contents

Accessibility statement

Your service must have an accessibility statement. This is covered under regulation 8 in the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 which applies to all public sector websites.

If your service sits under the main National Archives domain (nationalarchives.gov.uk) then it should use the main accessibility statement.

For services that don’t sit under the root domain (including subdomains), or use different domains entirely, the service must have its own accessibility statement. An example is this design system’s accessibility statement.

Writing an accessibility statement

GOV.UK has published an example accessibility statement to get you started.

In order to properly complete an accessibility statement, you need to have your service audited.

You can audit your service yourself as long as you declare this in the accessibility statement. A better option is to use someone like the Digital Accessibility Centre (DAC) to check your service. DAC have access to people with real accessibility needs and are capable of assessing against all criteria of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Cookies

You must tell people if you set cookies, and clearly explain what the cookies do and why. You must also get the user’s consent. Consent must be actively and clearly given.

There is an exception for cookies that are essential to provide an online service at someone’s request (eg to remember what’s in their online basket, or to ensure security in online banking).

The same rules also apply if you use any other type of technology to store or gain access to information on someone’s device.

Information Commissioner’s Office, Cookies and similar technologies

The National Archives uses four categories of cookies.

essential
These cookies are required in order to use the service. We don’t need to ask permission for them. An example would be a session cookie which is required to allow the user to log in to a service.
settings
Configured options for the site which are specific to the user. For example, default results view (grid/list) or light/dark mode preference.
usage
Used for analytics, tracking, and data gathering. This could include things like Google Analytics.
marketing
Used mainly by third parties such as Google when we embed YouTube videos in the site. These cookies are mostly used to profile users. The National Archives should not create marketing cookies directly.

Important information

Ensure each of the cookies on your service adhere to one of these four categories and only create them once the user has accepted that category. For example, don’t add Google Analytics until usage cookies have been accepted.

The main site sets cookies with the domain .nationalarchives.gov.uk in a cookie called cookies_policy. This means the user’s cookie preferences are available for all subdomains of nationalarchives.gov.uk.

The preferences are stored as an escaped JSON string. 

%7B%22usage%22%3Afalse%2C%22settings%22%3Atrue%2C%22marketing%22%3Atrue%2C%22essential%22%3Atrue%7D

When escaped and parsed, this produces a JSON object of preferences. 

{
  "essential": true,
  "marketing": true,
  "settings: true,
  "usage": false
}

If your service honors all of these preferences and sits under the nationalarchives.gov.uk domain then you can link to the National Archives cookie preferences page to allow users to set their global preferences in one place.

TNA Frontend cookie library

TNA Frontend comes with a cookie library that allows you to validate the user’s cookie preferences and perform actions once policies have been accepted or rejected.

Service-specific cookies

Publish a page that explains the cookies that your service uses, what their purpose is and how long they live. You can see an example of this on page describing cookies used on The National Archives website.

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