(Photo provided by the eSkills Malta Foundation)
Dr Chris Porter, a Senior Lecturer from the Faculty of ICT, has recently delivered a series of workshops entitled “Web Accessibility in the Public Sector” for senior technical officers from various Government ministries.
These workshops, held at the Valletta Campus on 28 November and 7 December 2023, were part of the eSkills Malta Foundation Annual Digital Skills Bootcamp and were jointly organised by the eSkills Malta Foundation, the Malta Communications Authority, and the Faculty of Information and Communication Technology at the University of Malta.
Public sector service providers are presented with a unique challenge: developing and maintaining e-services that can be used by a wide range of people, irrespective of their abilities, user agents and contexts of use. For this reason, the European Union has developed the Web Accessibility Directive to ensure that public sector digital services are accessible.
The directive is supported by EN 301 549, the harmonised European standard for digital accessibility. Based on this, workshop participants were provided with fundamental principles and practice-based insights on developing more inclusive digital services. During these workshops, participants also had the opportunity to share and discuss their own experiences, approaches and day-to-day challenges.
These workshops were designed with a number of learning outcomes, allowing participants to understand:
- core concepts related to accessibility, universal design, and inclusive design,
- how assistive technologies interoperate with user agents, and therefore,
- the importance of using semantically correct markup,
- how to follow, interpret and apply web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG),
- how to determine the appropriate authoring practices for accessible rich internet applications (WAI-ARIA) and
- to develop an accessibility testing strategy using checklists.