Giving digital accessibility a boost

Giving digital accessibility a boost – live and interactive training sessions

Many of our partner organisations have been working hard to create a culture of accessibility throughout their organisations.

Sevenoaks, Central Bedfordshire and Tonbridge and Malling have all asked us to help with this by delivering several virtual, live and interactive group sessions to introduce digital accessibility.

During these sessions we cover:

What digital accessibility is all about and why it is so important.
Digital accessibility is about ensuring that your digital resources are available to the widest possible audience. We know that in the UK, at least 1 in 5 people have a long-term illness, impairment or disability, and many more have a temporary or situational disability. We need to ensure that our information is reaching everyone.

The barriers and challenges users with disabilities may face in accessing digital services.
We explore the different disability groups – vision, hearing, speech, motor, cognitive – and the experiences people may have interacting with our services. We demonstrate a screen reader in action struggling through what appears to be a very simple document. We show the difficulties with accessing a PDF on a mobile and how hard it can be to navigate to where you need to go if information is not clear and simple.

The legislation and the support available.
We look at the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 and highlight how this means that everyone needs to ensure the content and documents they create are accessible. We then signpost to all the support that is available to help staff to do this:
• Our e-learning courses with bitesize videos of how to do things such as add alt tags, format tables, use heading styles, use the accessibility checker and more.
• The range of accessible template documents that we have helped our partner councils to create
• Guidance documents for staff and any external suppliers you may be working with
• Other useful online guidance and tools to help with accessibility
These sessions have proved extremely popular. We already have some more booked in for the New Year with Town and Parish councils.

“I really enjoyed this session, it opened my eyes to things I would never have thought of”

Revenues Officer, Central Bedfordshire.

If you would like to give accessibility a boost in your organisation, please get in touch.