Summer 2023 // Canadian Government Executive / 9 ACCESSIBILITY a public dashboard should look like. Departments should be on a government-wide leaderboard that highlights their web accessibility errors. This would allow executives to easily understand how their team’s work compares with others. It should also allow the ability to view progress over time. This can be automated so that data is gathered government-wide and reported on a monthly or weekly basis. CivicActions is working with open source approaches that allow for government-wide scanning using a central open source approach. Our goal is to produce an open source leaderboard, as we have described. 3) Support authors to create accessible content One of the best ways to improve accessibility for websites is to provide better support for authors. Most content on government websites is not written by accessibility experts. Authors need support in producing accessible content. The W3C’s WAI produced the Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0 to help provide guidelines for how authors can get the support they need. ATAG is broken into two parts. Part A highlights the need for the back-end interface to be as accessible as the front-end. The authors and administrators of government websites may have disabilities, much like the rest of the population. This is sometimes considered in procurement. Part B promises the biggest opportunity to address accessibility barriers. Authors should be supported in writing accessible content. Having patterns be accessible by default makes it harder for authors to create inaccessible content. There is also a huge opportunity to help use automated tools to show authors how to create more inclusive content. We know this works for spellcheck and grammar check—why isn’t this enabled by default by authoring tools for accessibility? It has been encouraging to see the advancement of authoring tools like Editoria11y and Sa11y which have built tools to help with this. The European Commission supported the We4Authors Cluster project, which supported accessibility best practices for authoring interfaces. The We4Authors project sought to determine what CMSs were used within the EU. The goal was to encourage the software designers to identify and implement best practices for authoring interfaces which would make accessibility easier. This may be the only cross-CMS author focused accessibility study that has been funded by a government. Of the EU government sites surveyed with the We4Authors project, the majority used Drupal. CivicActions participated on behalf of the Drupal community in this EU funded project. Some of the recommendations were already introduced in Drupal 8, while others are still being incorporated. 4) Create meaningful feedback loops through accessibility statements In Canada it isn’t uncommon to see government sites say that they are trying to meet WCAG 2.0 AA requirements, or even WCAG 2.1 or EN 301 549. But this statement alone is insufficient. The UK government has provided an amazing example of impactful accessibility statements. The UK is using their accessibility statements to assess issues like: • What are the known barriers? • Are there workarounds which are known? • What tools and techniques have been used to address accessibility? • Are there easy ways for people to report problems? Departments could go further to: • Track this feedback • Ensure that barriers can be submitted anonymously • If people provide contact information, provide follow-up to ensure their issue is being addressed • Link to existing accessibility policies • Provide links to descriptions of accessibility accommodations in physical offices The government of the Netherlands produces accessibility statements like the UK, but they have gone a step further. They are monitoring these statements across all their government sites. They are also evaluating not just the presence or absence of these statements, but if the statements need work to be fully compliant. In the Netherlands, government departments that do not have compliant statements need to state when they expect to have compliant accessibility. This pushes departments to identify and commit to a timeframe, rather than simply settling with not being fully compliant. People with disabilities deserve access to government services. Most are not interested in filing a complaint with the Accessibility Commissioner. Sites need to facilitate getting feedback from users with disabilities to those who can most quickly address those barriers. The guidance on this to organizations is overly general, and will be inconsistently implemented without clear direction. There is also a huge opportunity to help use automated tools to show authors how to create more inclusive content. We know this works for spellcheck and grammar check—why isn’t this enabled by default by authoring tools for accessibility?
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