When I look back over my posts I realise that I have written quite a lot about accessible information, but never described what I mean by the term or expanded on the people who need it. So here goes.
Of course everyone needs accessible information. But there are groups of people who encounter particular barriers when accessing information.
Information is accessible when it is readily available to diverse audiences in ways which they can understand and use. It is presented in a range of formats and styles to people who are print-disabled. They may or may not use a range of specialist technologies.
Print-disabled people are those who are; blind, or have low vision, or who have dyslexia or other related impairments. They may be hearing impaired or Deaf. People who physically can’t hold a book or paper, or who have difficulties processing the written word are also print-disabled.
Others may have poor education for a variety of reasons. They may have learning disabilities, brain injury, dementia or short attention span and/or memory or other mental health problems. People on particular medication may find concentrating on print difficult. They may have one or a combination of several impairments.
People with poor literacy or people who do not have English as their first language may also welcome many aspects of accessible information, as long as it is not stigmatised,
Now that I have given some context to accessible information, I will focus on some of the basics in future blogs.
Making your organisation’s information accessible to everyone needs thought and planning. An accessible web site is always a great start, but that could be part of a more effective wider communications strategy relating closely to organisational goals and purpose.
Accessible information needs to be
User focused
Relevant
Timely
Concise
Understandable
Portable
Perceivable
Acceptable
Tested
Available
Each of these points will be developed and explored in future posts.
Thank you to everyone who has followed my blog and commented over the past year. It has certainly been a busy, eventful and sometimes difficult one. I hope that, like me, you are able to take a break and do some things you really enjoy with some people you love being with.
May you all have a very happy Christmas and a safe and restful break. Of course not everyone celebrates Christmas. To those who don’t you have my good wishes.
The New Year will bring new challenges and opportunities for all of us. I have some new and informative posts planned so do return next year.
Recent widespread outraged reaction over Paul Henry’s gratuitously insulting language on the Breakfast Show is an indication of the role social media is playing in establishing strong national disability networks. The response from across disability groups also shows that the silos between different impairment types are beginning to break down, which can only be a good thing.
Paul Henry, and perhaps also TVNZ clearly had no grasp of the effect that so many disabled people and their supporters being connected online would have. Facebook was running hot and hectic, with pages I thought too extreme to join. Feathers were ruffled on Twitter, even among people who had no connection with disability. Various blogs of excellent quality debated the issues raised.
Because organisations like the Human Rights Commission and Broadcasting Standards Authority have online complaint forms, making complaints has become easier, with guidance on the way to frame them being readily available. Henry thought that IHC had it in for him, but it wasn’t just IHC. A whole range of disabled people and organisations took up the cause of a popular figure and a group of people who have little access to the media to fight back.
This is not the first time such campaigns have been conducted. Back in the nineties, before social media were invented, an international sports-shoe maker created an advertisement extremely insulting and offensive to disabled people. Within a very short time international networks had distributed the email addresses of advertising and other executives. This resulted in a flood of emails making it very clear that the shoe-buying dollar would be spent elsewhere. The advertisement was withdrawn and individual apologies emailed.
Establishing a new social action group on an issue previously hidden and not discussed has also benefited from social media and online connectedness,
This combination has meant the Disability Clothesline has been able to establish a national project quickly, and begin debating the issues of violence towards and abuse of disabled people in a way that would have been impossible even a few years ago before there was a critical mass of disabled people online
Such actions and campaigns can only become more sophisticated and organised. Watch this space.
In a city where you can and frequently do have all four seasons in eight hours the weather web site is regular viewing for those of us who can’t drive and therefore walk to work (and most other places.) We need to make critical decisions like: head to toe raincoat with hood or windproof jacket and woolly hat and scarf, shoes, sandals or weather proof boots, sunnies or not. And that’s just the outerwear.
Then there’s the issue if whether or not you need your merino vest and long johns.
I am not talking about mid winter either. A few days ago I sat next to a young woman on the bus who was wearing woolly gloves! I was envious of her comfort.
The Terrace, where I live and work in Wellington is a wind tunnel, and since it is almost always a southerly or northerly here the decision on wearing dangling or stud earrings may have health and safety consequences.
That’s why I was interested to try the beta version, now live, of the Metservice web site, where I am a regular visitor. The old site left a great deal to be desired in terms of accessibility. Sadly, although there are some improvements, so does the new.
I gave feedback as invited. I even phoned them. The person I spoke to had obviously never heard of web standards or accessibility, and admitted they were not included in the design brief.
Accessibility issues are not being addressed according to the feedback blog post, except they took down or renamed the page called About Accessibility which had information about different browsers but did not mention accessibility or have any content relevant to accessibility.
A few quick observations:
The new site is still quite busy and cluttered. You need good hand eye coordination to read the ten day forecast on the city page.
I suspect it won’t work well without broadband.
Some features seem to rely on mouse hovering only.
While the site enlarges reasonably I lose information on the right hand side of the page at a certain point. On further investigation I discovered that the information is the weather warnings!
There is no accessibility statement.
And the text is grey, which means I have to enlarge it more to make it readable. Grey text is pretty but unreadable, especially on the blog.
Colour Contrast on the maps is also not good.
Why is it that sites which provide important and most useful public information are sometimes the least willing to do it properly? If people are finding the site difficult to use I suggest they ring Metservice and ask them to read the information they want from the site to them, or email them and ask for a plain test version of the information they need. It might be the only way to get the message across.
It is interesting to hear Judge Peter Boshier from the Family Court calling for a radical rethink of the way we deal with domestic violence in New Zealand. He cites cases of suicide because of the lack of support for victims. He also cites the lack of accountability of the perpetrators through programmes never completed.
Nowhere is the need for action more acute than in the disability community where reporting is low, and penalties for murder lighter than for murder of non-disabled people. I know of at least once case of suicide caused by bullying, and more attempts.
Domestic violence has a different meaning in the disability context. The nuances include the usual domestic and family violence which includes murder. It includes bullying in the workplace and in schools at all levels which is nonetheless violence if not domestic violence. All forms, including domestic violence, are experienced by disabled women and men.
Violence also occurs in institutions large and small. This is complicated as the perpetrators are sometimes in paid employment with service providers. If violence comes from other residents there are often few choices or alternatives for either party in their living arrangements or who they live with. But in either case it is the victim’s home. They have nowhere else to live or to escape to. Violence prevention services are beginning to take notice but their focus is quite limited and inadequate in the disability context.
As White Ribbon Day approaches I am struggling with this as I reflect on the unnecessary suffering many disabled people experience at the hands of others in a variety of situations. We have all got stories to tell, but to tell them is a frightening prospect. Many have been deeply buried for a long time and bringing them into the light of public scrutiny may seem like opening old wounds, It can also feel like inviting more pain from those who already think they have he right to intrude in disabled people’s lives in ways they would never consider appropriate for non-disabled people.
Victims who experience this include children and the most physically and psychologically vulnerable and fragile people in our communities.
This “ownership” of disabled people and their issues by others results in a fundamental and significant difference between violence experienced by disabled and non disabled people. It must be acknowledged and understood by anyone who wants to work in this area.
The Disability Clothesline therefore is a project whose time has come. It provides a medium for disabled people to safely tell their stories and perhaps find some healing by decorating tee shirts with their stories in whatever way they want. Supporters and those fortunate enough not to have a story to tell can sign a supporters’ sheet. The tee shirts and the sheet are hung on the clothesline for all to see, to provide education and promote action.
The project wants everyone to know that:
Violence and abuse against disabled people is not OK
It is OK to talk about it and share stories
Violence towards and abuse of disabled people is a serious problem
Action can be taken to prevent and detect it
Everyone can do something about it
As an issue it is just as important as other forms of violence
I have been so busy tweeting, Facebooking, watching videos on Youtube and whatnot that I am forgetting about my poor old blog! All this social media stuff is quite time consuming. It does allow you let off steam though. I posted to Facebook immediately over a very annoying incident when Steve tried to take a taxi to get our empty cook top gas bottle filled. The driver refused on the grounds of ‘dangerous goods’! Fortunately he found one that would take him and the bottle. Gas bottles are heavy when full and the filling station is some distance away. So much for carbon footprint – It’s just another way to discriminate against those of us without cars.
The revised web standards for government became mandatory on October 31st. They are based on the new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. While I haven’t noticed a wild flurry of new sites being launched there are some intrepid souls out there attempting to make public sector web sites the best they can be. And since social media are on the standards agenda this is for them, and for anyone who thinks web standards are dead boring and serious.
Meanwhile there are still a few unconverted folks out there. One response we recently got at AccEase was “Our website steering group has decided to hold off on addressing compliance and accessibility during the development phase” There is really no other time you can do it so sadly that probably means never for that web site.
I have been a long standing member of the web standards working group. This is a group of Government web people and me as the resident advocate for disabled web users through DPA. We have worked on developing and reviewing the New Zealand Government web standards. The group has not met for a while but we have been resurrected so to speak.
We will be working on thorny issues like the use of social networks, and, yes you have guessed the dreaded pdfs!
I have been a bit slack about my blog lately, partly because I have been away without access to email. A lot seems to have happened in the last few weeks. My time been particularly taken up with family.
Towards the end of September I spent time with my mother, returning to my rural roots in Canterbury. I took the guided tour around my brother’s new state-of-the-art dairy operation on land that would be as dry as a bone were it not for irrigation. It seemed so strange that I had to pinch myself to make sure this was really true and not a cold-induced hallucination. I wondered what our father would think. Growing up in a traditional Canterbury sheep and cropping farming family we had always scorned “cow cockies” But although Dad was deeply conservative when it came to the behaviour and dress standards of teenage daughters he was never closed-minded about new farming developments. I suspect he would approve.
On Sunday Mum and I went to church. But instead of attending the beautiful neo-gothic St Johns we drove to Lake Coleridge under the lee of Mt Hutt, (Maunga Whare) on a lowering gray day with snow on the tops. The service was a homely spring festival, belied by the temperatures which were distinctly mid winter. A small group of people in a semi-circle around a comfortably crackling fragrant wood fire in the little community hall sang hymns and said prayers which had been refreshingly rewritten for the rural congregation. So instead of “We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land” we sang, “We plough the fields with tractors, with drills we sow the land.” It was a delightfully informal service, with one reader being moved to pause and mutter darkly “we could do without them,” to a reference to possums.
The warmth of the service continued in a hospitable high country home nearby where I found myself discussing the inappropriateness of young disabled people living in rest homes and the finer points of web design over a substantial morning tea in an environment where the views from the windows were equaled by the artwork on the walls and a pleasing modern interior of a house that blended satisfyingly into the landscape.
From Canterbury it was a flying visit home to fling the merino out of my bag and substitute some light weight cotton and head off to Brisbane to join other family members for a short holiday. It was below ten degrees in rural Canterbury and hitting thirty in Brisbane! There was relaxing, shopping, swims in the apartment pool, some river trips and of course good eating and drinking, and catching up with a friend.
And then back to the coal face, with two days of workshops and meeting, and a good old freezing Wellington southerly. Just as well I am a tough southern woman!
Here’s our chance to challenge gobbledygook. From 14th to the 18th September we can really focus on making our voices heard for plain English. On Friday the Plain English Awards will be announced.
Now and any time you should ask questions if a document, email or web site content is hard to understand. Ask for a plain English version.
For those who create information think of your reader rather than yourself or your colleagues
Think before you write. Who will read this?
Check before you send
Try reading aloud what you have written
Use short straightforward sentences
Use clear everyday vocabulary
Avoid the dreaded jargon and acronyms
Ask yourself –would my mother/grandmother understand this?
It is interesting to hear Judge Peter Boshier from the Family Court calling for a radical rethink of the way we deal with domestic violence in New Zealand. He cites cases of suicide because of the lack of support for victims. He also cites the lack of accountability of the perpetrators through programmes never completed.