Comments on: Council Web Accessibility ‘Should Be Built Into Procurement’

By: Martin Sloan

Martin Sloan — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 16:32:09 +0000

Interesting to see that the report concludes that accessibility “should be built into procurement”.

Councils and other public sector bodies have, since January 2006, been required by law to specify appropriate accessibility requirements, but clearly awareness of these legal requirements remains low.

The Public Contracts Regulations 2006 (and the Scottish equivalent, the Public Contracts (Scotland) Regulations 2006) require that:

“[w]hen laying down technical specifications…a contracting authority shall, wherever possible, take into account criteria for disabled persons or the suitability of the design for all users.”

This means that whenever a contracting authority issues an ITT for the procurement of any ICT goods and services (including software, hardware and websites), it should include appropriate requirements in relation to the accessibility of that ICT.

The regulations go on to say that technical specifications should be defined by reference to technical specifications in the following order of preference: British standards transposing European standards; European technical approvals; common technical specifications; international standards; or other technical reference systems established by the European standardisation bodies. In their absence, the relevant British equivalent should be used.

Clearly, this could include the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), BS8878 (which references the WCAG), and the various ICOs that deal with human computer interaction and human centred design.

Martin

By: David Walker

David Walker — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 15:24:04 +0000

I agree with Mick in that getting a CMS or a developer to program one, that is accessible across the board is easier said than done. However, the good news is that things are heading in the right direction with more council websites passing the RNIB accessibility assessment in 2011 than in 2010.

David

By: Mick Phythian

Mick Phythian — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 13:36:28 +0000

When I wrote the tender documents for our current site in 2005/6 I did of course specify accessibility (to ‘AA’ standard minimum) as one would expect, as as the report proposes. Without naming names, getting a CMS supplier to actually deliver that is a nightmare, since one doesn’t find out until the content is loaded and the site is up and running whether it actually is or not – and what do you do then? There is also the additional complexity of webservices, which are frequently procured and delivered from a range of suppliers, and can also impact upon a sites accessibility.

To quote an expert on this field, “accessibility is not a binary state”, and is therefore not easy to contractually specify.

So, yet again, from a practitioner’s view, easier said than done!