Digital accessibility legislation: how aware is your organization?
A colleague comes to your desk with an Excel document containing the pool opening hours. He asks you to put this document on the website. When you indicate that you can't post this document like this because it's not a PDF document, your colleague runs to the copier. A few minutes later, you receive a PDF with the scanned opening hours. Actually, this is just an image. Your colleague is unaware that this is not a digitally accessible PDF document, and so you can't post it.
Many web editors will recognize the above situation. Right? How do you ensure that everyone in the organization, from the board to your immediate colleagues, is aware of digital accessibility legislation? How do you make sure there is support for it and that your colleagues know how to apply it? We asked some of our clients!
Klaas Dolman of the municipality of Gorinchem provides the following steps for a top-down approach:
Step 1: Ensure support high up in the organization
To create awareness in the organization, it is essential that there is managerial support for the subject. Klaas: ''If you don't have the board on board on this topic, it's a cry in the desert.'' The board has an important task to put this topic on the agenda. Then turn it into a project or program in your organization and determine the impact.
Step 2: Include digital accessibility in policy
Establish how you as an organization want to deal with digital accessibility. This could be in a vision for service delivery or communication. Then translate this vision into a concrete policy plan to pursue the vision.
Step 3: Provide knowledge-sharing ambassadors
If knowledge to create accessible documents is lacking among employees, it is necessary to train them in this. Communication about this should be done both bottom up and top down in the organization. The policy should ensure that there is more knowledge in the organization, by dedicating training courses to this, for example. In addition, it is important that all web editors have the right knowledge. This way they can call others to account and monitor that only accessible content and documents are placed on the website. They are the ambassadors, so to speak.
Melvin Claessen of the municipality of Heeze-Leende also indicates that it is important that the web editors have a monitoring role. They indicate what can and cannot be placed on the website and act as gatekeeper. It appears difficult to do this without immediately having all the additional work thrown at you.
Step 4: Determine impact and get your management in order
Take an inventory of all the pages and PDF documents on your main website. Get this site in order by determining which documents you still want to make accessible. It is impractical to make everything from the past compliant. Use Web analytics tools to make your choices. Is a page or PDF not used much, if at all? Then consider deleting the document. Siteimprove is a tool that gives you a lot of information about the accessibility of pages and PDF documents. Is your municipal Web site in order? Then move on to any subsites or other websites managed by the municipality. This all sounds logical, but make no mistake. Practice is more stubborn than theory. The biggest issue is awareness and documents being delivered.
Could you use help?
We'd love to help. At Shift2, we advise local governments on how to continue to strive for accessibility for your online services. Wondering how? Then feel free to get in touch. We'd love to tell you more about it.
