AODA

The AODA & WCAG 2.0 - When it Matters

Submitted by mgifford on

The Accessibility Standard for Information and Communications for the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) was released earlier today and it's a great accomplishment that reflects the dedication of thousands of people who have worked for improved Human Rights for our fellow citizens.  It is great to see this act, which was initially received Royal Assent on June 13, 2005, finally receive the clarity about what will be required for web sites of organizations in this province.  Although the most immediate implications are for large public sector organizations, there are implications for all but the smallest organizations in this province.

The targets are appropriate. WCAG 2.0 AA is the target for the whole public sector and large organizations, although organizations have a phased in implementation starting with simpler single A standard. I'd love to see a more aggressive implementation as I really don't think anyone but futurists are thinking realistically about planning for their communications technology in 2021. Heck, back in a 1996 interview, Tim Berners-Lee defined a web year as about three months, in which case this implementation is over 28 web years away.

Now I'm not a lawyer, but in reading through the new laws it seems to me that obligatory organizations are any organization with more than one staff person in Ontario. As best as I can figure out this is the process which affect the web over the next five years:

WCAG 2.0 AAA - A Journey Not a Destination

Submitted by mgifford on

My finger pointing at the WCAG 2.0 AAA logo I've taken the notes about the process we are going through for our own site & attached it to this Drupal Accessibility Group Wiki Page. Please feel free to edit it.

We have gotten a number of RFP's in the past that have stated WCAG 2.0 AAA compliance as one of the requirements that they would like to have in their response.  It is great when folks are aware enough about accessibility issues that they can state of of their goals is to achieve the highest level of accessibility for their site. Really, who wouldn't want to have their website be universally accessible to their users?

However, it isn't an achievable goal for the majority of websites.

Nobody should be claiming WCAG 2.0 AAA

For a website site with any complexity at all to it:

  • It takes a huge accessibility budget to maintain. It is very time intensive to run every page of the site through the quick reference provided by the WAI. Even running through it through WebAIM's simplified checklist is a lengthy process. 
  • Some of the WCAG 2.0 AAA requirements can conflict with each other or other WAI guidelines. You have to know your users, and learn where to make compromises.
  • There probably aren't any examples out there of sites that are 100% compliant.  Individual pages might comply, but will still need to be reviewed on a regular basis.
  • The WAI is wisely focuses on broad objectives not on specific technology and the technology is perpetually changing. A user's browser or screen reader upgrade can easily break accessibility.

Webinar on Planning an Accessible Website

Submitted by mgifford on

Everett Zufelt & I have agreed to present a webinar entitled Introduction to Accessibility and Planning for an Accessible Website. We'll be posting links to the archive when it's up, but wanted to ensure that the presentations were available online (along with a PDF version) before it went live in case people wanted to follow along this way.

This presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license so please feel free to enhance/distribute it.

For those that missed it there is now a video archive of the presentation available.

Drupal in Government Ottawa Showcase - A Great Success

Submitted by mgifford on

Drupal in Government PresentationThe Drupal Showcase that we organized on June 15th was a great success. This event was organized & sponsored by OpenConcept and we were able to bring together over 75 people to learn about how and why public servants are using Drupal effectively to communicate.

We had representatives from 15 government departments including: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA), Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC), Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB), Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (FAIT), Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), Department of Justice (DoJ), Library and Archives Canada (LAC), Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), Public Works & Government Services Canada (PWGSC), Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat(TBS), and Department of National Defence and the Canadian Forces (DND) as well as the City of Ottawa.

The showcase began with an overview of why Drupal by Lee Hunter who works as a government contractor and is also a member of the Drupal Documentation Team.  This was followed by a presentation by Devin Crawley & Michael Keara about implementing a user-centred approach in Drupal and outlining the approach used by the Ottawa Public Library (OPL).  It was great having the OPL present as the event was also held in the Library & their support helped to bring more people into the event. Patrick Lajeunesse gave a great talk about using Drupal to prototype a CLF compliant Intranet and provided great examples from Agriculture Canada. The final presentation from government was by the Department of National Defence whose presentation outlining their use of Drupal for their Social Networking Intranet was quite inspiring. Jayson Peltzer provided some examples of how they are using Drupal & MediaWiki for all of their social networking needs.  The last presentation was by CIPPIC's David Fewer & Kent Mewhort who addressed their findings on Government of Canada contributions to GPL Projects. I decided not to present my report on the Drupal 7 Accessibility Initiative and it's implications for the CLF & AODA, but will find time to do that in another time. 

The event was recorded thanks to volunteers at FOSSLC. FOSSLC is a non-profit corporation dedicated to education, community, and business development involving open source technologies. They have been very active in promoting free software around the world and will be putting on an Open Source Technology showcase in August. Emma Jane Hogbin will be presenting a workshop there on Basic Design for Drupal.

I took some pictures of the event and added them to a Flickr Set. If there are other photos you've taken, please tag them with drupalgov.

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The AODA Customer Service Standard & Ontario's Public Sector Websites

Submitted by mgifford on

A lot has changed since our initial posting about the AODA in 2009. For folks looking for general information (particularly pertaining to the web), I would suggest reading our more recent articles. If you're particularly interested in enforcement of this law I would suggest looking towards posts by Blakes(March 2011), Weirfoulds (July 2011) and FirstReference (August 2011).

Ontario implemented the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) in 2005 and in January 2010 it will begin to enhance the level of services that people in this province can expect from their governments. 

Organizations Needing to Comply

The public sector organizations that now must meet the Customer Service Standard include Ontario government ministries, municipalities, school boards, community colleges, universities, public hospitals, public transportation organizations as well as some other agencies. All other organizations with over a year will have another two years before they need to conform to this standard.

The web has become a huge part of how people communicate and this act will significantly affect how organizations think about their online presence in the months to come. It is anticipated that websites by the organizations above will be required to reach compliance levels A of WCAG 2.0 (W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0). This will be a significant accomplishment as millions of web pages will need to be changed and evaluated. 

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