Web accessibility is key to improving access to information for millions of blind and partially sighted citizens. Yet, they need to be aware and skilled to share useful feedback with website and app owners.
Since February 2022, EBU has been involved in UPower. Co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission, the project aims to support the proper implementation of the Web Accessibility Directive by increasing the contribution of users with disabilities to the feedback process on public sector websites and apps.
Together with the Funka web-accessibility company (Sweden), the Technical University of Dortmund (Germany) and the Synthesis Centre for Research and Education (Cyprus), EBU has investigated over the past months how persons with disabilities, including blind and partially sighted users, share feedback when facing accessibility issues and how public sector bodies collect and process them. We do thank EBU members having participated in interviews!
As a result of this first stage, the consortium developed a toolkit on how to capture and categorise web accessibility feedback from users, in English. The document highlights the challenges faced when sharing feedback, explains what actionable feedback is and provides examples of feedback mechanisms.
What’s next? In the coming weeks, an interactive repository of best practices on how to provide structured web accessibility feedback will complement the toolkit, paving the road towards a model curriculum on how to train people with disabilities to provide relevant and actionable feedback. Such curriculum shall be tested with French, German and Swedish users in the course of 2023.
For more information on UPower, feel free to contact EBU at ebu@euroblind.org.