Web Accessibility in Local Government
Each year the RNIB, on behalf of the Society of Information Technology Management, conducts the comprehensive “Better Connected” report on the state of website accessibility in local government. This reminded me of a website I often have cause to use, that proclaims it meets “Priority 2 level of the W3C Accessibility Guidelines“. If you make such a claim, it needs to be truthful. In the rest of this article I illustrate how the website fails to meet their claims, why accessibility needs to continue beyond a once off assessment and what you need to do to maintain an accessible site.
The site in question is that of my local government, the Vale of White Horse District Council. It’s a little disappointing as they are on the whole, rather accessible when using the WCAG guidelines as a baseline. The main page is pretty much valid markup and degrades nicely when features such as colours, style-sheets, images and are disabled but a closer inspection reveals problems with XHTML validation, navigation, broken links to accessibility information, and use of absolute measurements that are likely to cause accessibility problems for users.
There’s a working page containing accessibility information, where the claim of compliance is made and it looks likely that at one point in time they had commissioned a positive report, or successful test of their website’s accessibility. What we must assume happened is that over time the website has changed (as all good websites do) but that accessibility has not been built into the process of producing the site. At one extreme we might even get the impression that accessibility was seen as an inconvenience that needed to be looked at once to satisfy some requirement.
Convince your management that your website’s accessibility is important; make sure everyone understands that it’s not just a technical problem. Build accessibility into your processes, bring accessibility checks into your testing of updates to your website and think about accessibility whilst you plan new content. Use automated tools regularly to check for silly mistakes but understand their limitations; software cannot solve all your problems. Care about how your users access your site and the problems they might face. It’s also important to remember that achieving compliance with any level of the WCAG is not the end goal of accessibility.
If you’re looking for a web publishing system that makes all this as easy as possible for you, you should check out our web hosting.
If you’d like to read more about website accessibility, here are some of my favourite web accessibility blogs.
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