Government-produced model toolkit for accessible websites and online content

The Online Accessibility Toolkit, published by the regional gonverment of Southern Australia, is a free and publicly available set of tools for making websites and online solutions more accessible and inclusive. The toolkit contains eight topics and was designed in consultation with people with disabilities.

The Government of South Australia has developed the Online Accessibility Toolkit, a free and publicly available repository to help people make their websites and online solutions more accessible and inclusive. The repository consists of eight topics, including visual design and user experience and was co-designed in consultation with people with disabilities. The approach drawing significant global recognition and now considered a co-design benchmark across all levels of government in Australia.

Problems Targeted

With more and more essential services turning digital, many websites and applications are not created with the diversity of the whole community in mind.

Solution, Innovation and Impact

As a result of more than 50 workshops and in consultation with a focus group of over 1,000 people with disability, the Australian disability sector, and more than 100 public, civil society, and business organizations, the Government of South Australia (population 1.77 million) created an Online Accessibility Toolkit. The toolkit provides practical solutions for organizations and governments to make their digital platforms more accessible for a range of people, including those with disabilities, those subject to geographic immobility, and users who do not speak English as their first language. The material is designed to support various professions, such as developers, project managers, or content creators, and provides step-by-step guidance such as how to test for accessibility and to use colour and contrast effectively. The success of the project has led to the South Australian Government working with governments around the world, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, to help improve their approaches to online accessibility.

Funding, Outlook and Transferability

The costs to support the policy are covered under a cost recovery model through the provision of the South Australian Government Website Design System. Website Design System is available to all South Australian Government agencies and provides agencies with simple and modern websites that maintain and exceed compliance to internationally recognised accessibility standards. In addition, all jurisdictions in Australia support the toolkit initiative for adoption at the national level, which is a short-term ambition of the project.

Pictures

The Online Accessibility Toolkit contributes to web accessibility across Southern Australia and already beyond

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THE STORY OF GISELLE – ADVOCATE, CAMPAIGNER AND USER OF THE ONLINE ACCESSIBILITY POLICY AND TOOLKIT

As an advocate, I now have a practical how-to resource that I can share.

I am blind and my guide dog, D’Artagnan, is my eyes when I am out and about in the physical world. But I also want to access the amazing digital world. While a computer or smartphone together with assistive technology bring the digital world to my fingertips (for example, I can correspond with my friends, read the newspapers, research subjects of interest), I still encounter accessibility barriers daily, even when I need to access essential digital services. For me, the Online Accessibility Policy and Toolkit is impactful in several ways. As a blind digital technology user, the Toolkit contributes to removing the barriers that I face and expanding my access to the larger digital world. As an advocate, I now have a practical how-to resource that I can share with ICT developers or policy and lawmakers when I speak about digital accessibility. In 2015, I started a campaign under the Digital Gap Initiative banner after resolving that something had to be done to bring about systemic accessibility reforms across Australia’s legal and social policy frameworks. My late father, who was an electronics engineer who designed a robotic arm, insisted that accessibility barriers made no sense in the digital world. He would take my arm and move it about and would say, “If I want my robotic arm to do this, I programme it to do this. It’s all about coding.” His words have been the driving force for my digital accessibility advocacy work for 20 years now.