Global Accessibility Awareness Day: ‘Design, Develop, Deliver’

Earlier this week (Thursday 21st May) marked Global Accessibility Awareness Day, an annual event focusing on raising awareness of digital accessibility and encouraging organisations and individuals to ensure provisions are in place for those with disabilities or impairments.

In 2020, WebAIM analysed one million home pages for accessibility issues and found the following:

• 98.1% Home Pages With At Least One WCAG 2.0 Failure
• 60.9 – Average Number of Errors Per Home Page

Causes of Most Common Accessibility Failures (% of Home Pages)

• Low Contrast Text – 86.3%
• Missing Image Alt Text – 66%
• Empty Links – 59.9%
• Missing Form Input Labels – 53.8%
• Empty Buttons – 28.7%
• Missing Document Language – 28%

At Enterprise Oxfordshire we’re committed to ensuring our offering is accessible to all of our communities and businesses and continue to learn and develop our services and tools to work for everyone.

Our Enterprise Oxfordshire Business and Enterprise Oxfordshire Skills websites both feature an Accessibility Tool function, where website viewers can set their preferences to work for them and any impairments or additional needs they may have – we also continue to develop the further rollout of these considerations across the organisation.

Alongside these disability profiles, these sites also implement the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions, along with optimized keyboard navigation.

Our Accessibility Statements for all of our websites delve further into what it means to be accessibility compliant, with considerations such as font, font size, colour and screen reader functions all taken into account.

Enterprise Oxfordshire Business are further committed to improving accessibility and have updated their business support offering for the next year to focus on areas such as ‘deaf-friendly’ events/webinars.

In our most recent series of OxTalks, podcast guest and Founder of ‘The Missing Link’ Olga Zilberberg talks about implementing neurodiversity awareness in the workplace and setting provision in place to work for all employees – for example consideration of ADHD friendly digital tools and ways of working.

Olga discusses what it really means to ‘do your job’ and how certain ways of working are suited to different individuals, but as long as the end result is achieved, does it matter how we get there? The episode also focuses on the role of managers to understand staff and how ‘work works for them’ – with considerations into different ways of submitting work, communicating with teammates, or even applying for jobs required.

The Missing Link and other organisations offer neurodiversity and mental health training to businesses to better support teams, with these considerations having strong positive effects on attitude to work, productivity – and ultimately inclusion.

View Supporting your Staff: Mental Health Training and Neurodiversity Awareness in the Workplace