Support for browsers, email clients and assistive technologies

Browsers

We test the admin app and document download pages in the browsers specified on the service manual. Tom uses https://www.browserstack.com for this so talk to him if you need to use it.

Rules of the game

This should be reassessed every 3 months, based on data from the last 6 months from our Google Analytics account.

Specific versions of browsers can be removed from those supported if less than 2% of visits use them. We should give at least 6 months past first observing this drop before dropping support for any major browser or version. This is currently the situation with IE11, which has now dropped to 0.6% of all sessions.

Note: document download's web interface is entirely made of GOV.UK Design System components and styles so actual supports the browsers they do.

Support for email clients

We don't gather any data on the email clients our users use to view emails from Notify so this needs researching.

In the meantime, we check in all the email clients on emailonacid.com (our testing solution) and prioritise by data from the various reports. For example: https://www.litmus.com/email-client-market-share/.

We have a copy of Outlook on the assistivelabs VM we use for testing with assistive technologies so we can test directly with it. Tom has access if you need to use it.

Rules of the game

Until we do some proper research, we should review the email clients we support, and their priority, every 3 months or whenever new data on usage becomes available.

Support for assistive technologies

We support the same assisitve technologies specified by the service manual when testing everything on this page.

Testing is done either by on our machines, using Voiceover (the screen reader built into our Macs), or through assistive labs for most other assistive technologies except Dragon. The assistivelabs VM we use with JAWS (screen reader) and Zoomtext (screen magnifier + screen reader) on it also has Outlook installed along with another copy of NVDA (screen reader) so we can test emails with all of them. Tom has access if you need to use it.

One of the laptops ('Fred') that used to be part of the empathy lab has both Outlook and Dragon installed on it so we use that to test emails with speech recognition software. Note that this does require a headset with a microphone to work properly.

We also test with the assistive technologies built into our phones (ie. talkback on Android).