Medway Council has redeveloped its website in a bid to
improve accessibility for disabled people and ensure it complies
with discrimination laws.
Under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, all organisations are
required to make reasonable adjustments to their systems to allow
people with disabilities to access them. The final provisions of
the Act will come into force in October 2004.
To comply with the Act, the Office of the E-Envoy recommends that
government websites meet the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative)
level A standard specified by the World Wide Web Consortium. Medway
Council plans to meet level A conformance by May 2004.
Sean Hale, the council's web manager, said, "There is also an
ongoing compliancy programme for Medway to meet the requirements of
the Disability Discrimination Act. Ninety five per cent of the site
conforms to WAI level A today. We have a few internal databases to
change."
Hale also plans to ensure accessibility is maintained whenever the
council purchases new software. To this end, Medway Council issued
an accessibility statement on its website which said, "Vendors
supplying software used to develop our site will be required to
provide information by May 2005 on conformance to W3C/WAI's
authoring tool accessibility guidelines 1.0, conformance level
A."
The project began a year ago, following consultation with local
people with visual impairments. Hale said, "We realised assistive
software could not cope well with the frames that we used on our
old site and presented accessibility barriers. We found we needed
to focus more on the accessible content of the site than the
branding."
The project also involved hiring a web designer with experience of
building accessible websites to create mock-up sites that the
council could show to the focus groups and test.
The site was built using the Ixos Obtree C4 content management
system and supports XHTML, which Hale said would allow the council
to meet part of the requirements of the e-government
interoperability framework.
Along with testing how the website coped with popular accessibility
software such as Windows Eyes and Jaws screen readers and IBM's
voice browser, Hale used the Bobby software from Watchfire to test
the site for accessibility compliance against the WAI
specification.
Further developments on Medway Council's website include a
community portal and an electronic complaints form, both of which
will be rolled out this month. In September, the council will roll
out online payment services for council tax, business rates and
parking fines.
www.w3.org/WAIwww.medway.gov.uk