New platform provides info on Dutch organisations’ electronic accessibility

From security to inclusivity

“Every website has to be accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities,” says ICF Chair Elger Jonker. “Basistoegankelijk.nl shows where there are still issues, without organisations having to pay for expensive audits.” The platform’s name means ‘basic accessibility’, and it builds on the success of another SIDN Fund-supported project, Basisbeveiliging.nl (‘basic security’). That platform provides information about the security of public websites, and has triggered countless improvement initiatives. With the new project, however, the focus has shifted to accessibility.

Making electronic accessibility easier and cheaper

“For many organisations, an ordinary accessibility audit is quite an undertaking,” says Elger. “It’s expensive and time-consuming, and the findings are liable to be quickly invalidated by changes made after the site goes live. Our platform changes all that. We use an automated tool to detect ‘WCAG fails’ and immediately put the details online. So developers know exactly what they need to look at first, and executives can see at a glance whether their organisation is meeting its responsibilities. All the code behind the platform is open source. So anyone who wants to do their own tests can download the scripts from GitLab.”

Traffic lights

Assessment of an organisation’s electronic accessibility starts with an inventory. A wide variety of data sources are checked to track down all the internet addresses linked to the organisation – even including addresses the organisation itself has forgotten about. Scanning software then checks each site, which can mean looking at as many as 1,000 pages for a single domain. “Using an open-source automated measurement tool, we check for WCAG issues that can reliably be detected by technical means, such as poor colour contrast or missing alt-texts for images,” says Elger. “The results are displayed on interactive maps using traffic-light colours. Red indicates an accessibility problem. With a couple of clicks, a visitor can see exactly where the problem is, and which WCAG requirement isn’t met. There’s even a screenshot of the problem region. We simply report what we find. So it’s not a name-and-shame exercise, because we’re ‘faming’ too: reporting what organisations are doing right.”

Screenshot of the website Basistoegankelijkheid.nl of the map of the Netherlands showing national government organizations.

Elise van Schaik, Project Coordinator at SIDN Fund: “A sizeable proportion of the Dutch population have disabilities that make it hard for them to use websites. If you’re colourblind, or you’ve got Parkinson’s or impaired vision, navigating your way around a website can be very difficult, if not impossible. Website builders can help those people out by following the WCAG. However, by no means everyone actually does that. So lots of websites are inaccessible to people with disabilities. By checking on the accessibility of a huge number of websites, the ICF is incentivising site administrators to get to grips with this topic. That's a positive development for electronic accessibility.”

Support from SIDN Fund

“SIDN Fund’s financial support has enabled us to achieve a great deal,” Elger continues. “For example, we’ve been able to systematically improve the accessibility of our own website. It’s now much easier to read than the ‘basic security’ website. At a later date, we’ll turn our attention to the layout, and cross-reference the two sites. Another thing we’ve been able to do is set up the software to run in parallel on 4 machines, which can simultaneously scan 20 to 100 sites. Through SIDN Fund, we’ve also come into contact with other organisations active in this field. The Accessibility Foundation gave us advice on which tools to use, and the team behind the Lees Simpel app gave us some ideas for an extra readability test that we’d like to add later this year.”

Want to know more? Visit Basistoegankelijk.nl or mail elger@internetcleanup.foundation.