Accessibility Workshop Follow Up

Report on the outcomes of the web accessibility workshop in NICVA on 28 September 2005. A list of useful resources and the presentations from the day are also available for download.

Following on from Connecting the dots, the ICTConsortiumNI organised a workshop to look at the thorny issue of web accessibility and digital inclusion in more detail. The event was enthusiastically accepted by the voluntary and community sector with over 75 participants attending to hear leading accessibility expert Jon Gooday deliver his keynote speech.

Web Accessibility from the expert

Jon Gooday from AbilityNet got the event of to an energetic start with a whistlestop tour through web accessibility. The workshop included plenty of live demonstrations proving that even the biggest sites, such as Amazon, can have problems with basic accessibility.

Rather than simply dwell on the problems Jon provided some real world examples of how to quickly improve the accessibility of your site for minimal cost.

A local perspective

This interesting overview of the issue of web accessibility was followed by representatives of local agencies giving their experiences of web accessibility. Gary McGladdery from Disability Action gave an eye-opening presentation on the difficulties a disabled user has when accessing the internet, and the frustration this causes.

Help the Aged’s Gillian Burnett gave an informative presentation on the difficulties in getting an accessible website, even if you know what you are looking for. However, the success of the new Golden Surfers site shows that it is possible to work through the difficulties around this issue and achieve a high level of accessibility compliance. The last speaker before lunch was Stephen Gray from NICVA. He gave an overview of the importance of recognising the need for accessibility early on in a project – using the CommunityNI.org portal as an example of what an approach can lead to.

Getting an accessible website

Following lunch Richard McVeigh from NICVA gave an extremely thorough and useful guide [link to this from here] to the website tendering process. Following on from this description of current problems, Jon Gooday outlined hope for the future with an overview of the forthcoming ‘PAS 78: Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites’. While this ‘Publicly Available Specification’ is not the law, it will be an extremely useful tool when commissioning sites when it is completed in the near future.

Accessibility in action

The workshop concluded with participants having the chance to test the accessibility of their sites using a wide range of assistive technologies. Following on from the entertaining workshops this section gave participants a chance to see how disabled users use their sites.

Many thanks to all our exhibitors (The Cedar Foundation, Disability Action , RNID, and Browsealoud) who displayed a vast amount of technology available on the market and gave participants a chance to experience the difficulties disabled users have in accessing the web.

Next steps

As a result of the call from participants for tips and guidance around web accessibility we have produced the following list of resources on web accessibility.

· Wealth of free information on http://www.webaim.org

· Abilitynet website http://www.abilitynet.co.uk/

·EU Information Society Website

·Abilitynet Resource list (80KB)

However, participants also raised the difficult issues of funding, site auditing and a lack of technical know how to implement changes to improve failing sites. The ICTconsortiumNI will endeavour to follow these issues up and circulate any outcomes via this website.

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Resources - Websites and downloads

• Wealth of free information on http://www.webaim.org
• Abilitynet website http://www.abilitynet.co.uk/
• EU Information Society Website

• Abilitynet Resource list (80KB)
• Keynote presentation from Jon Gooday, Abilitynet(1,035KB)
• Gillian Burnet on Help the Aged's experiences (400KB)
• Commissioning accessible websites- Jon Gooday, Abilitynet (150KB)
• Gary McGladdery's thoughts from a user persepective,Disability Action (266KB)

The Accessibility Workshop was organised by the ICT Consortium NI