Stylised person presenting in front of a whiteboard

Oxfordshire County Council

Accessible content training & organisational support

In 2018, new legislation came out requiring organisations who receive public funding to ensure their websites are accessible - WCAG Level AA compliant, at a minimum. Oxfordshire County Council were keen to use this moment to improve their content and their workflow, and so they requested we lead a series of in-person workshops for their content team. 

https://www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/

    Workshops

    The workshops we facilitate  are informative, conversational and interactive. We illustrate concepts with real-life examples from the organisation's daily practice and tailor them as much as possible to the needs of the group we are working with. 

    Over a period of four weeks, we delivered four day-long workshops with the content team, covering: 

    • Scene-setting: Understanding the team’s vision and roadmap towards accessibility and their current level of expertise.
    • Empathy building: Experiencing first-hand some of the barriers that web content can create, using customised Chromebook personas
    • Accessible content 101: The basics of writing and testing accessible content, with real life examples from their web content to illustrate. 
    • Accessible forms 101: The basics of designing and creating accessible forms. 
    • Accessible PDFs 101:  The pros and cons of PDFs, the basics of designing and creating accessible PDFs, and a strategy for the future. 
    A list of checked items

    Practical solutions

    We also dropped in to see the content team at work, and were able to recommend improvements to the editorial interface to help them create accessible content. 

    From that, we co-created a checklist for the team to take back to their work.

    Organisational change

    Having told us about their workflow, and the pressures they were under to “just publish it” from other departments, we thought about how to take this work forward and bring about change within the organisation. 

    The team left the workshops armed with information and with more confidence to campaign for accessible content. They also had ideas about how to increase awareness within the organisation. 
      

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    Testimonial

    "Our council has a culture of accessibility and digital inclusion being someone else’s problem. ‘Taking responsibility’ is one of our council's values. So these workshops made my team more aware of what to do, how to do it and most importantly why to do it.

    After the training we had knowledge of how to train our own staff and become evangelists within the organisation for web accessibility."

    David Upjohn
     Web content manager, Oxfordshire County Council.

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