My thanks to @dianarailton who tweeted an article ‘UK retailers still failing to meet web accessibility standards‘. With so many barriers in stores if you are disabled, shopping online from the comfort of your home is an attractive option. Furthermore, under the Equality Act 2010 all retailers must provide access to their goods online as well as in store.
There were several common themes why all of the web sites failed to meet the Level AA of the WCAG 2.0 guidelines. This means that disabled people would face difficulty in buying a product on each site, with half of the sites completely inhibiting people at certain points in their journey.
The Equality Act 2010 applies to intranets as well as external sites in the UK. Other countries have similar laws their intranets need to comply with.
Are you serious about engaging with people and collaboration?
How can an organisation engage with all its employees if a minority cannot use the intranet? How do employees collaborate using the tools on the intranet if some people cannot access them? First, your intranet must be accessible for this to achievable.
When I hear people talk about making their sites accessible, some still think as long as the design can be read by JAWS for people who are blind. It does! But the scope is far wider than that for a site to be truly accessible to everyone.
It is accepted that 10-20% of people have some form of disability. This includes people whose finger joints become stiff or eyesight needs glasses and the size of text to be enlarged. Most of these disabilities happen just through the normal ageing process and wear and tear on life at work and home.
For your intranet to be fully accessible these barriers that prevent employees fully engaging and collaborating must be removed.
How to make your intranet accessible?
Wearing my governance hat I believe you need to take the following steps:
- Have a governance framework that covers how content is published and who is responsible for creating and managing it.
- Have an Accessibility publishing standard that refers to the WCAG guidelines and explains how a publisher creates accessible content.
- Have publishing templates that mean content can be enlarged to allow everyone to read it. Have images with mandatory fields to describe what they show as alternative text for people unable to view the images.
- Provide training to help educate your publishers to understand why this is important and how they comply.
- Audit random samples of content to ensure it complies with the Accessibility standard.
If you put all these steps in place you will have a solid foundation for your intranet. You can encourage people to engage with your organisation and to collaborate with each other.
You can then be confident you can reassure your stakeholders this will happen.
