The City of Ottawa is increasing its efforts to make it easier for people with physical disabilities to use municipal websites.
This year’s municipal accessibility report pays special attention to making the city and its various departmental websites more accessible.
The City of Ottawa Municipal Accessibility Plan, or COMAP, includes a summary of the year’s progress on expanding accessibility infrastructure and was presented to the finance committee on April 2. The report showcases areas in which the city has made improvements to web accessibility, and identifies public Internet portals that need work.
The report also included a revised accessibility policy for the city, which passed without amendment, Robyn Guest, a senior aid to city manager Kent Kirkpatrick, says of the city’s accessibility office.
Special attention is being given to removing barriers to accessibility on city websites.
Last year’s accessibility policy included a section on “Accessible Websites and Web Content.” While that focus has stayed the same, this year’s plan outlines more specific ways to achieve online accessibility.
The city’s websites are required to comply with provincial guidelines for web accessibility.
The guidelines call for two levels of accessibility for websites managed by Ontario municipalities. Level A has to be met by January 2014, and level AA has to be achieved by January 2021.
Guest says the city has decided to meet AA specifications ahead of schedule and to bring all of its websites up to that standard by 2014.
She explained that having to make corporation-wide changes to meet the A level, and then having to do them again for the AA standard would be less cost-effective.
“We have made a lot of progress just by moving to the Drupal platform, which is a content management system,” Guest says. “And that platform has much enhanced accessibility built into it.”
Drupal is an open source content management software that the city is using for its online presence.
“All the coding and all of the framework of the website has already been built to WCAG level A compliancy,” Guest says about the new platform.
“Anything that’s put into the new system will then be automatically accessible,” Guest says.
There is a big difference between a website that has been optimized for accessibility and one that hasn’t, according to Sam Fulton, a blind Ottawa resident and chair of the Eastern Ontario board of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.
Fulton says an accessible website is much easier to navigate for people who use screen readers.
Screen readers are software applications that people with visual impairments can use to find information.
The applications work by reading text on web pages, allowing people to find links and blocks of text on a website.
“Everything on the site needs to have a text component, so even if you’ve got a photo on, at least underneath it there needs to be a tag that explains what it is,” Fulton says.
Guest says the city has also gone through an extensive in-class and e-learning program through which they teach writers and editors of online content how to prepare reports and other documents in accessible formats.
Guest says the shift toward accessibility has been a big task, but it is going well. She added the city has conducted a lot of testing with members of the Ottawa community and have made major improvements already as a result.
She says she hopes the shift toward accessible documents will benefit the entire Ottawa community.