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Right hello everybody.
So you heard this morning some of the theory and background to where we are
with disability and equality now.
You've heard great practical examples of organisations
that have been very successful in making sure their services are
accessible to as many people as possible.
What I'll talk about now is just the bit in the middle, if you are working
in a public organisation and you want to make sure that you can be as
accessible as possible to as many customers, regardless of age, size,
ability or disability, then we want to be able to make sure that you have
that information available to you.
At the moment I'm the only thing that stands between you and a cup of
coffee, so I'm going to keep this quite short!
Also I'm the accessibility development advisor, we have the
accessibility knowledge, we want you guys to have that accessibility
knowledge available to you as easily as possible.
So fairly straightforward we made a website, accessibility.ie, what we
did with the website was we want you to be able to access it, and this
content to meet you wherever you are, if you have anything that can connect
to an internet, no matter what size it is, you will be able to use this
easily, the website will adapt itself so you are able to use it easily.
If you are in a meeting and a question comes up about
accessibility, if you have your phone or iPad, a Kindle, anything else you
will be able to get this information easily.
If you want to play along, as I'm showing you all of these feel free to
take out the phones, Siobhan asked to you make them silent, but please free
to take them out and go to accessibility.ie, if you want to use
the Wi-fi here the password is americano -- all lower case.
So I'll bring you through the various steps, we only have 12 pages on the
website, we want to keep it as simple and focused as possible.
The first one, and it's massively important, is to commit to
providing accessible services.
We visit a lot of public bodies, when we talk to the staff there they say
we really want to improve what we do, we really want to make sure that all
of our customers can come in, nobody feels discriminated against,
that our buildings are welcoming and all the staff know how to talk to people.
But sometimes you wouldn't necessarily know it as soon as you
look at somebody's website or come into the building.
So if you are committed to making your services accessible, tell the world.
State your commitment, ideally get as senior a person as you can to sign
off on that and then put it somewhere everybody can see it.
Tell your customers what to expect as well.
We heard the example of the solicitor who had premises that wasn't fully
accessible, but was prepared to meet people wherever they wanted to be so
they can access his services, and if that's the position you are in,
if you are in a building or using a website that you can't immediately
upgrade to be fully accessible, let people know about that.
Also collect feedback and it was mentioned already this morning.
Get feedback from customers, see what you are doing right and see what else
you need to do and then see if your customers have good ideas for how to achieve that.
The next thing and this has been mentioned a few times, is to provide
disability equality training for staff.
We'd like to see an ongoing programme of disability equality training,
not just something that's part of initiation that staff get once and
get rusty on, we like to see a programme where every couple of years
somebody has to do this as part of the PMDS or something.
And as has been mentioned we have an E-learning centre, completely free,
very educational and very importantly it's something everybody enjoys
when they're going through it.
You can also find an experienced trainer to give that personal touch,
if you're going to do that try to find somebody who has worked with
other public bodies or worked with disability groups and who is speaking from experience.
The next thing, and again a hugely important one, is to consult with
customers with disabilities.
So ask people what exactly their needs are.
There is a danger if you don't ask people what they need you might
misunderstand what you think they need, you might put all your
resources into something they don't want and it might be something else
and it could be very straightforward that they are looking for instead.
When you consult people, whether online or in a building, if it's
face-to-face, make sure it's accessible, make sure people are able
to get in and get out quite easily.
Allow enough time. People with disabilities in some cases might only
be able to meet you at certain times, they might have a lot of other things
they have to do, try not to impose tight deadlines on consultation,
people want to reflect and discuss with people in other situations about
how your project will impact their lives.
Treat the meetings like any other meetings, set the agenda so everybody
knows what will be discussed and send minutes around afterwards so
everybody has a clear idea of what was talked about.
Next thing is to consider accessibility when procuring.
So a lot of you probably sent out requests for tenders already, there
are a lot of legal bits you usually include in there, bits about freedom
of information and health and safety and so on, we'd like to see section
27 of the Disability Act 2005 in there.
That says when a public body are going to procure any buildings or
services, any goods, they are going to have to make sure that they are
accessible to people with disabilities.
It does mention some exceptions and they are clearly outlined and we show
those on the website as well.
So when you have a request for tender you can state accessibility, you can
find out from our website and from the ICT procurement toolkit we have
on the Centre of Excellence in Universal Design website, which sorts
of standards you should have, when you get a new website, building or
service, there is probably a standard there already, just find out what the
standard is for the service, mention that, say that the service
that you're procuring must meet that particular guideline and if necessary
then, if you don't have the expertise in-house you might want to find
somebody else to help you, check that the building and information will be fully accessible.
Next thing is to include accessibility in the customer
charter, you probably have a customer charter, again state your commitment
in there, make sure people can see it easily.
Promote your complaints procedure, nobody likes to get complaints,
but they do make you re-think about the services you provide and how you
accommodate your customers and I have written customers on this slide a few
times, I think it should be citizens as we have heard earlier today.
A handy thing is to promote multiple ways that customers can contact you,
some can't or don't like using the phone or e-mail, some can't come in
and meet you face-to-face in the building during business hours, so
the best thing is to have a variety of ways they can contact you and you
can contact people back in the same way.
Then it's important for staff to understand what's in the customer
charter, particularly about accessibility and then to reflect on
how that affects the work they do and the service they provide.
We've heard from two very successful access officers today and they have done great work.
They are also part of access teams, so it's great to train up your access
officer, they should know the information that's contained in this
website, it would be helpful to them and then you can have a diverse access team.
It's useful to have as many different levels of seniority and people from
as many different departments within your organisation as possible,
it means you can share knowledge across the organisation when you are
discussing how making something accessible in the organisation will
affect you, you hear from people in other parts of the organisation as
well, it will make your team much more successful.
It's good to have regular meetings, ideally monthly or every second
month, so that you don't lapse on any of these.
And it's great if you can meet the customers and disability groups and
then find out what's going well, what's not going so well and what are
the particular areas you need to focus your limited resources on.
The next thing is make your services more accessible.
To consider the difficulties that your customers might have and ask
them directly what you could do and at this page on our website we talk
about different types of disabilities people have, different situations,
such as waiting rooms before people go to get the service they are
looking for and we discuss a few tips to make sure you can provide those
services in an accessible way.
Later on one of my colleagues will talk about "Buildings For Everyone,
the Universal Design Approach", a fantastic publication that goes into
great detail about how you can make buildings accessible to everyone
regardless of age, size, ability or disability.
We have brief information on this page, as well as links to that
publication and we go through a few things to keep in mind about your
buildings, somebody, even if they're not qualified architects can walk
around the building and check it accommodates as many people as possible.
We'd like to see public buildings audited every three years; that's a
reasonable timeframe we think and we have a link to this on the website,
guidelines for what to expect when you get your building audited, so in
there it shows just a number of steps you might need to go through, first
what do you expect when the person is there, and we have a template for
reporting then, which is quite important, because if you are paying
for somebody to audit the building or if one of the staff is using their
time to audit the building, then you want to make sure the results you get
back are not just a list of things not going well, but things you can
address, so you can create an implementation plan to say here is
what we need to address first, here's the person responsible, here is how
we'll go about fixing it and here is when we want it to be fully accessible.
So the implementation plan will discuss how you will address those
and make the information available to the customers as well and make sure
people understand the good work that you are going to do, so they won't be
discouraged if they have had a bad experience with any of your buildings.
We would also like to see access handbooks, these are living documents
that contain regularly updated pieces of information about everything to do
with accessibility and your building, for example lists of rules that keep
the building accessible, don't store photocopier paper in the middle of
the corridor, because some people need the full width as they are
driving down it; you might have an accessible toilet and you might
write in your handbook that cleaners are not to store vacuum cleaners in there.
Again we have a full template for the access handbooks, you can just
download it, it's a straightforward Word document and just tailor them to
your organisation, you'll find that helpful.
In a lot of the cases you'll find the staff have the information they need
in their head, it's stuff they do everyday, but it's great to get it
written down somewhere.
This one then is extremely important, plan safe evacuation for everybody.
So it's great to make sure people can get into a building, we are concerned
with making sure they can get out of the building as well.
Personal emergency egress plans are very effective, PEEPS for short.
What you do is make sure anybody that may have difficulty in getting out of
the building in an emergency has a plan that's detailed for themselves,
for their own conditions, for the buildings they work in and the way
that's best for them to exit in the event of an emergency.
We'd like to see people having at least two evacuation drills a year to
make sure it will happen on the day.
And a very interesting one that you can discuss in your own buildings
with your own staff, is can people use lifts in emergency situations,
a lot of the perceived wisdom is that you can never use a lift, because the
lift is too much of a risk.
In some cases a stairwell might be a risk in that it might take somebody
longer to get down or they can't get down a stairs so the stairs might be
more risky than a lift.
So we'd like to see if lifts can be upgraded so they are safer to use in
an emergency situation or taken as part of the general emergency plan
that you have, that you look at how much of a risk and what the other
risks are and make sure that they can be used in a sensible way.
There is a picture of an evacuation chair behind me, they are brilliant
and have saved many lives, but keep in mind some people cannot use them,
some people because of their condition or disability will not be
able to use an evacuation chair, so don't just install an evacuation
chair and assume everybody will be able to get out of the building in an emergency.
Second last thing I want to talk about is making your information more accessible.
And it's great to focus on the information that customers need.
We have heard already today about trying to move away from jargon and
information and language that's specific to your own organisation and
thinking about what your customers need.
We like clearer user-focused language, the handiest thing to keep
in mind is, in a nutshell, just write the way you were taught to write in
primary school, then everyone can understand it, "the boy kicked the
ball," not "the ball was kicked by the boy", not that "all staff and
colleagues are kindly advised to be aware that the ball has been moved",
just make it easy as possible to understand what you mean.
So we heard about the different alternative formats that are
available from a large organisation like Revenue.
You don't necessarily need to have all those different alternative
formats for every piece of information you produce; in fact you
probably don't if you are in a smaller organisation.
You do need to know how to get to them, so another thing we have on the
website is a template that you can download and fill in, and what you do
is fill in, for example, if somebody asks for Braille, where you go, what
the contact details are, how much it costs, how long you think it will
take somebody to get that.
So if a customer asks for something in Braille or a sign language
interpreter, instead of saying "I don't know, I'll look into that",
you can say here's how long it will take and we should get that to you in
two working days or whatever.
It's great to have an accessible information policy as well and to
make all the staff aware of that, so the staff know that providing
information in alternative formats and clear language is something your
organisation do and that there is an obligation to do it.
The last thing is to make your websites more accessible.
So Minister Howlin mentioned this morning a number of services now
available online, we have to make sure as many people as possible are
able to access all of those.
The great news is that there are guidelines, they are specific, very
straightforward and they're the web content accessibility guidelines 2.0,
we have summarised those as a series of questions, here are the 14
questions, all on the web page, you need to ask about all of your web content.
Now websites have a technical side, you might need outside expertise in,
you might need to go to some of the staff more savvy with this, one thing
you can do and we provide an exercise, so a bit of homework from
this talk, one thing you can do is to learn to use word processing software
properly, to structure all the information and to give it meaning,
that's much more useful to people with disabilities, so somebody who
wants information in larger print or somebody who will listen to
information being read out by a screen reader or use a different
device will be able to understand it much better if you structure it in the first place.
Even if you never work on the website, if you just use Microsoft
Word, or one of the other word processors, you should know how to
specify a heading as a heading, not make it look a little more like a
heading, how to make lists and tables properly, instead of
just making them look a bit like lists or tables.
It's good to audit your website every 18 months or so and again when you
have audited something you can develop a plan from that.
So from the audit you can say here is the plan, here are some bits we don't
have the resources to address now and here are other bits that are easy
wins that we're able to fix easily.
From the audit you can tell the world what you have done and what you
haven't and it's good to audit as soon as possible and then you can be
honest with the customers and say this part of the website doesn't work
yet, we hope to have it improved in six months, in the meantime call in
or phone us here or here's a form to fill out, the main thing is let
people know how exactly they can get that service.
So if it won't work online that they know how to get it somewhere else.
Right, so that's it.
Accessibility.ie, I hope you all tell people about that.
You guys have given up your time to come here this morning; you have
bought into the idea of making things accessible already.
We hope you use this to encourage your colleagues and encourage people
you know in other public organisations to understand a bit
more about accessibility, see how straightforward it can be and make
your services and buildings and information as accessible as possible.
Thank you.