We expect when we head into a County building there will be ramps, ADA parking and other accessibility features.
The front door for many County services is our website, and it needs to be just as accessible. But it may not be clear to many employees what customers with disabilities even need from online services or what steps staff need to take.
To help build awareness of potential issues and how to resolve them, the Customer Experience Initiative recently put on a Digital Accessibility Workshop. The event included not just the initiative’s ambassadors, but web content leads, Diversity and Inclusion champions and departmental ADA coordinators.
As attendees were told, and all County staff should be aware, website accessibility is not just good customer service. It’s a legal requirement. There are extensive guidelines to follow, and anyone who posts things, or makes decisions about what goes online, needs to take them into consideration.
The workshop included a demonstration by a legally blind County employee, David Stotland, of assistive technology he needs to use websites. That included a screen-reading tool, which reads aloud the text on a page.
Stotland’s demonstration, and a following presentation on common dos and don’ts, drove home the importance of having actual text on webpages and documents. County staff post a lot of PDFs online. If the PDFs are made as images, they’re invisible to people who can’t see. Adobe has instructions on making PDFs accessible.
The same goes for images or graphics with words in them. They’re often used with the intent of making a page more visually appealing. But if there is not equivalent text on the page, the information is not there for someone using an audio screen reader.
Color contrast between text and background is another common issue. There are precisely defined contrast ratios for passing or failing accessibility standards. Design decisions can’t be based solely on what someone thinks looks good.
