I hope that you are well and that you are finding ways to still operate your business. I wanted to take a moment to discuss some of the aspects of digital accessibility relevant at this time.
Summary
Never before in our digital environment has accessibility been more important, and for some, more difficult to implement. Customers can no longer visit premises in person if the digital material is not accessible for them. Our government and corporate clients are facing enormous difficulty ensuring that their systems work for customers/clients, but also setting up remote working arrangements for staff, many of whom will have disabilities.
In order to assist our clients, we are offering on-line live training in digital accessibility beginning in early May. Details of what we are providing are below. We hope that you are able to join us and take this opportunity for up-skilling both yourself and staff. This will ensure that when things return to normal, you are able to return with further skills and knowledge in how to make your digital materials more accessible for your users.
Working remotely during current contact restrictions
At Web Key IT, we have been working remotely since our inception nearly 9 years ago. We work on a remote desktop, so that we can provide timely feedback and contact to our clients no matter where we happen to be at any time. This is working in our favour now, as we have well-developed systems for working. However we are aware that for many of you, this presents many new challenges. I know that organisations such as Microsoft and Adobe have published information to clients to help them adjust to remote working and how to be efficient and reliable in this environment.
One thing we have noticed is that when people work from home, they crave person-to-person contact. We also realise that while it is a great time to catch up on training to upskill and be prepared to assist digital users more efficiently, this all has to be conducted online. No one enjoys those ‘tick the boxes’ online training sessions where after about 15 minutes you want a nap.
We are looking at putting some of our training online in a live environment, and perhaps also make recorded sessions available for recap later. The first course we want to offer is “Digital Accessibility – Level 1”, which will introduce the concepts and theory behind digital accessibility together with methods to equip the novice evaluator to examine a website or application and determine whether or not it will pose problems for users. It will be offered in a live one hour per day format for 5 days in a row, with a choice of two times to enable people in other time zones to participate. There will be a live lecture component, workshop exercises and assignments. A certificate will be provided for those who complete the course and all deliverables, with a period after the completion of the course days to get all assignments caught up. Assignments will be marked by Web Key IT staff to ensure that the material is suitably understood, and digital certificates sent to completing participants. We plan to offer other Web Key IT courses online following the launch of this course.
As we are hoping to run this first course by the beginning of May, we are looking for expressions of interest from our customers and contacts. We would appreciate hearing from you at training@webkeyit.com with your thoughts, comments, and expression of interest. Emma, our administrator, will be in touch after that to provide you with a course outline, course start date, cost and other participant arrangements.
I am hoping you can join us for some valuable personal instruction and that this will also give you some of that necessary personal contact with the outside world. I look forward to hearing from you in the very near future. Please, stay home, and stay safe.
This is a special once-off newsletter from our Director. We will not spam you with unnecessary emails, and will resume our monthly e-newsletter on Friday.
