Canadian Government Executive - Volume 23 - Issue 02

February 2017 // Canadian Government Executive / 7 under a (sensible) grace period – they are aware that web accessibility must be ad- dressed but there’s been no impetus to put it on the top of the to-do pile or move precious resources to make it happen. But, the grace period that most govern- ments have operated under is coming to an end. Minister Qualtrough’s project is putting a much-needed spotlight on the issue, and more provinces are now outlin- ing firm dates to enact standards. In short, inaccessible government websites will soon not be tolerated. Those whose responsibilities include managing their city, region or municipal website must begin to act now because many governments are unaware of the deep and binding changes various de- partments have to make to ensure a web- site is always accessible. A website is an ever-changing document and is planned, penned, managed and edited by various people in different departments over a long period of time. To ensure everyone is rowing in the same direction takes plan- ning and leadership. An Org Chart For Web Accessibility Success The best place to make change is to start with the person or persons for whom the buck stops when it comes to the website. That might be an IT manager, a market- ing manager or a Webmaster. But buy-in and awareness of the issue must include decision-makers further up the ladder. Making a website more accessible likely means changing processes in various de- partments, so multi-level engagement is vital. To assess a site’s inaccessibility, an on- line tool can be used to assess every line of code to see where the biggest flaws can be found. Finding these faults can begin con- versations about website management processes and how adding accessibility considerations would affect that process, and then how the government goes about changing process for the long term. Next step is education. For an organiza- tion that has a decentralized system of web maintenance and management, this Design is crucial that anyone who touches the website must understand what web ac- cessibility is. They must be educated to understand which facets of a web page might be inaccessible to a person with disabilities and how to make sure they amend content to fix that. It’s also important to understand how this training can be imbedded into all fu- ture web training. Making a site compliant just today isn’t helpful – all new pages and documents must always be compliant. Best Practice: Start Small, One Step At A Time The idea of training webmasters to learn WCAG 2.0 can be daunting, but there are a number of top-line issues website manag- ers can begin to address immediately that will significantly improve their status and come closer to compliance. Clean Up The Code The first step to accessibility success is for website guardians to ensure clean, qual- ity code. Excessive or non-compliant code, created by bad designers or bad design software may be non-compatible for as- sistive technology and special software. Working with a good development team to go through and clean up your backend code is vital. Add Alternative Text Adding alternative text for visual elements of a website is a cornerstone of good acces- sibility. Alternative text is simply adding a descriptive ‘tag’ to a website element, tell- ing a user what it is. A button, an image, or anything: assistive technology will take the information that the element conveys and then ‘translate’ that into a clear and concise phrase or sentence. Simply, if any element cannot be ‘read’, then it may not be accessible to a person with a disability. Reassess Site Hierarchy Websites are not books or newspapers, we do not read them or navigate them in a linear way. To create an accessible site one must approach a website’s content hierarchy as web content. Headers are To assess a site’s inaccessibility, an online tool can be used to assess every line of code to see where the biggest flaws can be found. particularly important to make site hier- archy cohesive – websites are constructed using header tags in descending order to organize the information. Much like we visually ‘scan’ a web page, accessibility technology and software ‘scans’ a site us- ing these tags, so it’s essential that website headers and page hierarchy is simply and correctly organized. Fix Forms A form can be the most complicated part of a website. They may have to interact with a database or another form and re- quire unforgiving pieces of code. A good form should allow a user to ‘tab’ their way through, moving from one box to the next in order and fill out the fields only with a keyboard. But if a form isn’t correctly coded at the back end, it may not work for someone with a disability. There are more issues to consider, but this illustrates how simple code changes can help persons with disabilities im- mensely. Helping Millions of Canadians On average, Canadians spend more than 36 hours a month online, more than anyone else in the world. They are also spending plenty of that time in govern- ment digital spaces. According to recent government data, more than half of Ca- nadians regularly search for informa- tion on municipal, provincial or federal government websites and more than a quarter are using the Internet to commu- nicate with their government. It’s fair to extrapolate from this data that millions of Canadians who have a disability are using the Internet to try and connect with and speak to their government. At the end of 2016, the Canadian Ra- dio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced that broadband Internet is a basic service that all Canadians are entitled to receive, un- derlining the importance of high speed Internet in our modern lives. Just as Ca- nadians are entitled to receive high speed Internet, Canadians with disabilities are also entitled to be able to use that service and have equal accessibility to the infor- mation it provides. K evin R ydberg is a senior digital accessibility for Siteimprove’s Qual- ity Assurance and Web Governance services (www.Siteimprove.com ).