This week we’ve continued to think about accessibility, celebrating how far we’ve come and recognising what more there is to do.
As we shared last week, essex.gov.uk now has a fabulous accessibility score of 99.6%. We’re now having our work validated by the Shaw Trust, who will help us to identify any remaining fixes we need to reach the magical 100%.
And on the subject of accessibility, Hannah, Caroline A and Georgiana ran a fantastic show and tell presentation for the team following the GDS accessibility course they attended. This was a very timely reminder of the importance of working accessibility standards into public services and the work we need to do to help other parts of ECC understand and embrace this.
Content
Caroline M’s been wading through the inaccessible PDFs register, converting these into content on a web page where possible and flagging where further guidance will need to be added into the form.
Hannah read through the content strategy and accessibility toolkit, did some discovery work around online forms and redesigned and published some content within the services we sell section of essex.gov.
Caroline A has done Contentful and short URL handovers with Collette and been finalising some outstanding pieces of planning and environment content. She’s also been reviewing that pesky PDF register, looking for pdfs that can be converted to html pages.
Service Design
Bhupinder has had a fun week! She had the opportunity to present at the cross-government design meetup at GDS, which focused on social outcomes and economics. She reflected upon her experience and learning of trying to assign financial value to social outcomes in Essex and enjoyed fielding some searching questions from her service design peers.
She also had her first full day of TASC (Transforming Adult Social Care) with colleagues from Adult Social Care and FutureGov. Together they looked at the outputs of a huge piece of Discovery work completed earlier this year and started to develop plans and ideas that can be tested across Essex.
Nic has been buzzing around getting ready to kick-off of a service design project around Adult Social Care financial assessments. With Helen he’s also been meeting with colleagues from Customer and Technology Services to better understand how we might support ECCs channel shift programme.
Team Highlight
Our highlight of the week has to be that 99.6% accessibility score. We're really proud of this achievement and are committed to helping everyone across the organisation understand the value and importance of making our services accessible for everyone.
1 comment
Comment by Zivile posted on
Thank you for an interesting post. May I ask what GDS accessibility course was attended? This might be useful for our staff as well. Many thanks.