The Australian Web Accessibility Initiative (OZeWAI) co-hosted a fully accessible workshop with the Future Skills Organisation (FSO), which was held to gather evidence for the FSO’s ‘Bridging the Digital Divide: Digital Accessibility and Inclusion’ discussion paper. Over 40 people participated online, from local, state and federal government.
Top Five Key Messages:
- Lack of formal training and qualifications: There is a significant gap in formal training and qualifications in digital accessibility, making it challenging for organisations to hire and train effectively.
- Policy enforcement issues: Policy holders can only encourage accessibility practices but cannot enforce them, leading to inconsistent implementation across organisations.
- Budget constraints: Many organisations lack the budget for accessibility training and audits, which hampers their ability to comply with accessibility standards.
- Need for a general policy template: There is a need for a general policy template that organisations can customise based on their specific accessibility requirements and audience.
- Awareness and advocacy: Increasing awareness and advocacy at high levels of government and within organisations is crucial for improving digital accessibility practices.
Detailed breakdown:
Organisational challenges in hiring and training in Digital Accessibility
- A lack of formal training and qualifications
- Lack of knowledge to include accessibility requirements in procurement
- It’s hard to get anything except anecdotal feedback
- Policy holders are only able to encourage, not enforce
- Senior managers don’t support accessibility as no one in State Government is “policing” standards or we don’t report against it in our Annual Report
Digital Accessibility maturity
- How might we shift the responsibility for creating accessible digital environments from individuals to organisations
- Help create a general policy template that each organisation can customise/expand on depending on their accessibility requirements/audience
- No budget for accessibility training
- People can say the website is accessible, but it is not audited
- We do have some goals around digital accessibility in our Disability Action Plan, but it feels like they’re written in a way that they can be easily ticked off, rather than in a way that will enable us to truly have an impact on accessibility in our organisation and improve people’s experiences and access
Metrics or key performance indicators
- Lack of resourcing to properly assess accessibility is quite a barrier to anything being enforced
- Having a ‘tick of the box’ approach when it comes to accessibility as opposed to doing it meaningfully from the get-go
- How might we normalise accessibility as a procurement standard?
- Create a credential or accreditation for digital agencies, developers and graphic designers to attain so that we can be sure they have the right knowledge. Many times they claim they know accessibility but they don’t
- Lack of content and knowledge
Policy or enforcements being used in organisations (not Standards)
- It’s hard to find one consistent voice about what our baseline should be (if above WCAG)
- Should we have one policy in place that makes the workplace accessible to all – instead of metrics for women employed, Disability Action Plan, RAP etc. Encourage cultural shift instead of putting the focus on an individual group?
- Nobody wants to take responsibility for writing a policy let alone enforcing it
- It’s “too hard” and there is no time as everything is urgent
- Get government to enforce accessibility requirements and have a penalty for not being compliant so management will do something
Organisation culture
- OZEWAI to create more awareness in WA at high levels of State Government. Advocate to Office of Digital Government to advocate more with agencies to take digital accessibility seriously
- There aren’t many people with the relevant skills
- Organisational appetite to undertake W3C Maturity Model
- Internal accessibility testing is subjective and dependent on experience doing the audit
- Accessibility not considered important or relevant and thus overlooked
We also built on what was shared in the workshop to develop some future planning in this case, how might we questions and next steps.
How might we…
- Create a framework for organisations to take baby steps in becoming compliant with current standards
- Unfortunately for whatever reasons, OZeWAI and WCAG requirements are not known in majority of organisations and businesses. Plan to become more engaged with industry leading bodies and support them with their networks. i.e. Regional Development Aust, Tourism orgs, Local Government Association SA
- People saying they know accessibility but their knowledge is low. No formal training
• Understanding what is the minimum standards an organisation can shoot for if resourcing is not available to meet current standards - What is an acceptable level of “compliance” with WCAG or AS EN 301 549
Next steps…
- Should be a mandatory introduction to accessibility as part of employee onboarding. Particularly for roles with content contribution or design aspects
- No funding to purchase independent external accessibility audits by accessibility professionals
- How might we maintain the momentum developing around the Disability Royal Commission recommendations re accessible ICT procurement
- Create some awareness videos for teachers, trainers and business that can be shared
- Not strong commitment from the top
Thank you to everyone who attended for your valuable feedback. Your input was truly appreciated and the content generated from the workshop will be integrated into the development of the FSO’s workforce plan and recommendations will be used to develop future activities early next year.
In the meantime, if you would like to add more context or provide any further details, please feel free to email Rachel at rachel@futureskillsorganisation.com.au.