We are committed to complying with W3C standards in the short term.
As part of centring feminism and decolonisation, DDP is committed to Disability Justice and accessibility. Over the past two years, we have begun to design and implement institutional policies in this regard: We ensured access to internal information in our three working languages, provided interpretation services in Spanish and French for our online activities and face-to-face meetings, and improved contingency budget mechanisms. We also set up a working group on Disability Justice and Accessibility to foster discussions and concrete measures within our organisation.
As part of these efforts, we partnered with Accessibility Lab, an organisation “that seeks to ensure the inclusion of people with disabilities through accessibility in the digital world”. Nancy Reyes and Raashi Saxena, accessibility experts, proposed us to work on two projects: an audit of our website to identify improvements and a web accessibility training workshop for DDP team.
As expected, the audit report highlighted a lot of room for improvement. Accessibility Lab, in line with the four principles of the W3C Accessibility Standards, suggested a list of recommendations for us to comply with AAA requirements. Building on these recommendations, we have designed a comprehensive action plan, which we are eager to implement in the coming months.
The training sessions focused on the differences between usability and accessibility, understanding new user personas’ needs, learning about assistive technologies, and getting familiar with the web content accessibility principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. We also had space for exchange to ask specific questions about accessibility challenges in our work.
This partnership marks the beginning of our concerted efforts to make our work platforms accessible to everyone. We are excited about our progress and look forward to sharing regular updates.