At the Commission's monthly meeting in March 2008, a member of the disabled community registered a complaint that the Commission's web site was not accessible to people with a variety of impairments, particularly visual. A sub-committee was formed to investigate the complaint and, in a subsequent meeting with this individual, it was decided that the Commission's web site should be re-designed using established guidelines for accessibility. That effort has now been completed. The newly designed web site can be viewed at:
www.scccod.net
In the process of testing the new web site, several online validation and evaluation tools were used to measure the level of accessibility. In addition, the Commission requested an independent review from The Vista Center for the Blind. As a comparison, the Santa Cruz County's home page was also evaluated. A review of the test results clearly shows that the County’s home page has a poor level of accessibility.
Advances in assistive technologies such as the JAWS and WebAnywhere screen readers now make it possible for those with a variety of impairments to access the resources available on the Web. To be effective, however, many of these technologies require that individual web sites adhere to common design standards and guidelines. Guidelines for accessibility have been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) through their Web Accessibility Initiative (www.w3.org/WAI/). Their recommendations include a number of relatively simple procedures to use when developing a web page. A summary of those procedures includes:
-Comply with W3C HTML coding standards
-Use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for page formatting
=A logical organization of page elements so that the page can be read as a document with titles, headings and content
-Appropriate tags and titles for images and tables
-Appropriate use of contrasting colors to accommodate those with color blindness
Currently, the Americans with Disabilities Act does not require government web sites to provide access assistance analogous to designated parking places or wheelchair ramps to public buildings. However, the ADA Administration encourages State and local governments to voluntarily incorporate these guidelines in to their web site development. Their recommendations, which reference the W3C/WAI guidelines, can be viewed at:
www.ada.gov/websites2_scrn.pdf
The Commission on Disabilities believes that County should "get ahead of the curve" and incorporate these guidelines into future implementations of the County's web site. There are potentially hundreds of people in Santa Cruz County who are currently denied access to this important public resource.
This is a great idea
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