Links, links, links…
For the convenience of course attendees, the links we mention in our courses, as well as further resources and reading material, are available for you to launch at our curated eAccessibility Library beta: wcag2.com/library
For the convenience of course attendees, the links we mention in our courses, as well as further resources and reading material, are available for you to launch at our curated eAccessibility Library beta: wcag2.com/library
Andrew Davies explains: “My name’s Andrew Davies, and I’m the Manager of Experience Design for Shaw Media. My team of web designers and user experience designers are responsible for the maintenance and enhancements to all of our brand websites and applications. Those brands include Global TV, Global News, Food, HGTV, Slice, History, and Showcase.
My team will be embarking on a redesign of one of our major branded websites, and there was an opportunity for us to incorporate accessibility as part of this redesign. So essentially David came in for a full day of training for about 30 developers, 10 graphic designers, and my UX team. I was concerned that taking that many people out of their daily work schedule was going to be really hard on the business, and also be hard to keep those people engaged.
David used real-life examples, got people up and interacting. It was an amazing experience. Tremendous amount of feedback. People stayed for the entire session. Often times people would be jumping up for meetings in other full-day sessions. Not the case with David’s.
I’m very confident that moving forward we’re going to be able to incorporate all the best practices to make sure that our new branded websites will be fully accessible, and that we’ll achieve web accessibility accreditation.”
The Republic of Ireland was one of first jurisdictions on Earth to establish accessibility legislation (the same year as Ontario’s AODA). Unfortunately, the regulations associated with the Irish Act were not as strong or enforceable as Ontario’s legislation, resulting in gaps between intent and compliance.
The National Disability Authority (NDA) wanted someone with international experience working with governments developing accessibility legislation to speak to key leaders within the government and within NGOs in Ireland to make the business case for accessibility and demonstrate how to achieve accessibility in ways that are culturally and financially sustainable.
NDA sponsored [LINK:] David Berman’s keynote at that year’s global Plain Language International conference], at Dublin Castle. In the same trip, they also hosted a strategic presentation and conversation facilitated by David Berman for a gathering of leadership people in each of the major departments in the Irish government. The intention was for David to be able to bring lessons learned from consultation with other governments, to discover what successes and techniques could be successfully adapted and adopted in Ireland. The meeting was such a success that NDA had David return a month later to speak at their conference in Dublin: a gathering of representations from government and NGOs from both Ireland and the UK. In addition, David gave a remote webinar months later to further NDA stakeholders, from our studio in Ottawa.
Our team provided full support to NDA, working in tandem with them day (and night, across time zones!) through phone calls and online screen sessions. For both our keynote speech and our small boardroom presentation to senior management from each top government department, we followed our best practice processes to ensure that nothing got in the way of the best strategy and messaging for NDA: effectively, impactfully, and with utmost professionalism.
We have been involved with Government of Canada Treasury Board standards on accessibility for over a decade, and authored the multi-year accessibility strategy for the Canadian Human Rights Commission. We have provided training and strategy to governments in Australia, Bahrain, India, Ireland, Malaysia, Mexico, Norway, and Oman. No matter where we’ve been involved, we know that when we design for the extremes—and we bring our decades of design thinking experience to that process—everyone benefits.