Public Procurement and Property

Global Accessibility Awareness Day

May 19, 2022 by Fiona McCaig No Comments | Category Scottish Procurement

Today (19 May) is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). The purpose of the day, is to get people thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than one billion people with different disabilities.

One of our outcomes for public procurement in Scotland is to be #OpenAndConnected

To be open, we aim to create digital accessible content that provides all users access to the same information, regardless of any impairments they may have. To celebrate GAAD, we wanted to reflect on some of the measures we have been taking over the past year to make our digital content as accessible as possible.

The Scottish Government’s website provides an ‘accessibility statement’ –  “We’re continuously working to make gov.scot as accessible and usable as possible for all abilities and disabilities. This includes older audiences and those with visual, hearing, cognitive or motor impairments.” Accessibility is recognised as a UN Human right, it’s the law to abide by this right.

In 2021, around 240,000 people visited our procurement pages on gov.scot. Using an online tool we can estimate that of these users over 50,000 have some kind of disability and many other impairments. Impairments can be:

• permanent (blind or partially sight loss/deaf or partial hearing loss)
• temporary (ear infection/broken wrist)
• situational (environment where audio can’t be used / screen broken)

Over the past year or so, our team have made it a priority to produce and share accessible content through several different ways. We have

• changed the look and formatting of our Scottish Procurement Policy Notes (SPPN) and Construction Policy Notes (CPN). By removing unnecessary colouring, reducing sentence length and following our Scottish Government style guide to adapt our formatting to be as accessible as possible
•  added voiceovers to all animations we share to help those with sight impairments
• added subtitles to all of our videos we share
• added alt text to all images we share in blogs and social media posts

We encourage all content creators to find out more about making accessible content as every user deserves the same experience online with or without impairments. There are several online and in person events run by GAAD organisation this year, to give people a chance to learn more about the importance of accessibility.

For further information on public procurement in Scotland please visit www.gov.scot/procurement

Please email enquiries to scottishprocurement@gov.scot

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Tags: accessibility, open and connected, procurement, Public procurement, public sector procurement, Scottish Government procurement, Scottish Procurement

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