Accessibility Education & Outreach Working Group

Questions & Answers

Do you see any need to specialize the work done in EOWG to the European geography, or is it better kept as global resources?

Global resources in general are preferable to make them relevant across the board; they can always be adapted to the specific context in which they are used, as we are doing in the Open University in the context of higher education.

Transcript

So our next speaker is Jade Matos Carew, she's Head of Digital Accessibility and Usability at the Open University in the UK.

She's also a member of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Education Outreach Working Group, which is the topic that she will be introducing in her presentation today.

Jade, the floor is yours.

Thank you, and thank you for inviting me to speak here today.

Léonie has just given a wonderful introduction to accessibility, and I'd like to continue with that.

So, today I'm going to talk about the Education and Outreach Working Group, the impact of our resources and their importance to our European audience.

So, before we get to that.

Just let me change my slides.

There we go.

So the power of the web is in its universality.

So, this web accessibility right from the beginning has been woven into the fabric of the W3C.

And it's one of the principles on which the W3C was founded on, along with internationalization, privacy and security.

So, I hope it doesn't need too much explanation, but the web needs to be fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware or their software, their language or location, or their ability.

And the web accessibility allows disabled people to participate equally in the digital world and offers an opportunity to lift barriers to communications and interactions that many people face in the physical world.

To that end, the W3C has the Web Accessibility Initiative, and it develops strategies, standards and supporting resources to make the web accessible to people with disabilities.

This includes guidelines for web content, applications, browsers and authoring tools, along with resources to improve web accessibility evaluation and processes and tools.

So, it does this by supporting education and outreach and coordinates with research and development to promote harmonized international uptake of web accessibility standards.

So, what about the Education and Outreach Working Group, what do we do?

So, we're responsible for producing resources to promote awareness, understanding and implementation of web accessibility.

And we're chartered to work collaboratively with the other WAI Working Groups to support public awareness and successful implementation of WAI guidelines, specifications, notes and other resources.

One of our strengths is that we have a really broad and global membership and our kind of participants have a really wide variety of skills and come from different contexts.

And this really feeds into our strength as a group when we create resources.

And just a little bit about the resources that we create.

As Léonie said, the W3C is known for its accessibility resources.

And the reason for this is, well, there are a number of reasons.

One of them is that it bridges the gap between often quite technical standards and the reality and how they operate.

This is particularly important to an audience that might not be used to dealing with technical standards.

They might have non-technical backgrounds.

And the EO resources really bring to life user needs and disabled people and how they use the web and digital content.

EO resources also bring meaning to policy, law and practice.

So kind of removing that from the abstract and bringing it to life.

In a similar way, we emphasize the importance of people with disabilities and this is woven through all of the resources that we create.

The EO resources can be used and applied in many different contexts.

I come from a higher education context.

And at the Open University, which is where I work, we have the largest proportion of disabled students of any UK university.

So web accessibility is fundamentally important to what we do and our mission and values as an organization.

And because of this, our staff really need to be trained in good practice for web accessibility right across the board.

All staff have a responsibility in this area.

So it's important that we're able to rely on resources that are relevant and meaningful to their roles.

An example of how the OU has used EO resources.

Well, we use them in a number of different ways, but one of the most effective ways that we've had recently is when we were developing our in-house developers on their training.

We use the WAI developer modules as the basis for our developer training.

We were able to create a bespoke course that was contextualized for that audience.

Other resources that we have were able to reference the W3C and the EO resources.

And this makes them a lot, it makes it a lot more effective to do this.

It's not just me and my team saying this.

We're using the gold standard of accessibility resources, and we're able to demonstrate that we're using something that's credible, reliable, and trustworthy as a reference.

It's not just higher education, of course.

All different organizations, businesses, everyone can access and adapt these resources and link them into their guidance for their own staff.

Our current work.

So what are we doing at the moment?

At the moment there is lots of updates to existing resources.

For example, the easy checks resources.

So this is a simple way to start reviewing web accessibility of a website, appropriate to a range of different levels of audience.

We're also updating our kind of flagship resource of how people with disabilities use the web, along with our WAI tutorials.

Why are we updating existing resources?

Well, we don't need to reinvent the wheel.

These are resources that are tried and tested and relied upon by a wide audience.

These resources stand out from the crowd.

And this is really important at the moment, because we see so many different resources being created.

There's a proliferation of blog posts and independent resources created.

So being able to rely on EO resources is important for our global audience.

And people are increasingly needing accessibility resources that are good quality.

The reason for this in Europe is because we have the impact of the European Accessibility Act.

And this means that everybody has a new benchmark for our obligations in terms of compliance.

We have benchmarks that we need to now meet.

There was also an interesting recent stance against overlays by the European Commission.

And this has an impact too.

So overlays are automated software that claim to detect and fix web accessibility issues.

And the European Commission has said that they disagree with this and that they aren't an effective measure of web accessibility.

So in turn, that means that EO resources need to continue to be relevant, high quality and anticipatory of audience needs.

So we really do have a part to play in the current accessibility landscape of Europe.

And that's me.