Public Procurement and Property

Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2023

May 18, 2023 by Chris McLean No Comments | Category Best practice, Human rights

Today (18 May) is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). The purpose of the day, is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital accessibility and inclusion.

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

To be open, we create digitally 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 2022, around 243,000 people visited our procurement pages on gov.scot. Using an online tool we can estimate that of these users, over 51,000 may 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 two years, 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
• adding 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

An example of one of our videos featuring subtitles.

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 in person and online 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: #OpenAndConnected, accessibility, GAAD, Scottish Procurement

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