Good Communication Awards 2010

We are please to announce that we have been nominated for the ‘Website Accessibility Award’ in local government  by the Good Communications Awards 2010.

The Awards, sponsored by Polycom and taking place on Thursday 15th July at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, will this year be presented by Nicholas Owen of BBC News.  My colleague, Lucy and I will be going to the black tie event to see if we are victorious.

The nominees are…

Getting help with accessibility issues

AbilityNet has created a Global Assistive Technology Encyclopedia where you can discuss your accessibility issues with the community.  It states that…

Its’ purpose is to provide live and up to date information on everything to do with Assistive Technology. Unlike other static websites, this one is a Wiki, which means that anyone who is a member can enter information.

AbilityNet has also created a very useful list of factsheets that can help you to overcome your websites accessibility challenges. I highly recommend for you to have a look as it can be very useful.

Link to AbilityNet’s list of Factsheets

The accessibility challenges we still face today…

Research of Public sector website in 2004 that still complies to today’s accessibility challenges

The Disability Rights Commission (DRC, 2004) in the UK completed a study of 100 web sites to review problems disabled users encounter most frequently. The study found that just eight checkpoint errors and warnings accounted for 82 percent of the reported problem. The most reported problems included: –

  • Checkpoint 1: Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element.
  • Checkpoint 2: Ensure foreground and background colour combinations provide sufficient colour contrast, etc.
  • Checkpoint 3: Ensure pages are usable when scripts, etc. are turned off, or provide an alternative.
  • Checkpoint 4: Until user agents allow users to freeze moving content, avoid movement in pages.
  • Checkpoint 5: Divide large blocks of information into more manageable groups where natural and appropriate.
  • Checkpoint 6: Clearly identify the target of each link.
  • Checkpoint 7: Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site‟s content.

So, there is a lot that we can still do to improve accessibility of local government websites with these techniques.

We hope this information was useful.

The Webteam