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Re: municipality web sites & people with disabilities

for

From: Peter Krantz
Date: Sep 23, 2009 1:05PM

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 20:45, catherine < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> I was wondering if anyone had some pointers towards studies or
> initiatives of cities' and towns' use of web technologies as it relates
> to interacting with their citizens with disabilities. This could be
> anything from studies of how municipalities fare with regards to
> accessibility in general to specific initiatives to make Web based
> information more accessible to certain types of disabilities (such as
> the City of Montreal's controversial portal for people with cognitive
> limitations[1]).

The city of Stockholm, Sweden (http://www.stockholm.se/) has recently
launched a website where accessibility has been an integral part of
the design process. Some features include:

1. designing e-government services to be accessible with AT,
2. having basic information available in easy-to-read swedish,
3. including a text to speech function to cater for people with
reading difficulties,
4. providing certain information in sign language (click "Teckenspråk"
on this page http://bit.ly/DR0BU for an example).

On a side note (not directly related to web accessibility) is the
involvement of the city in the e-adept project
(http://www.eadept.se/). This project is designing a navigation
solution for visually impaired people with much greater resolution
than GPS, based on more detailed maps, to enable visually impaired
persons to travel around the city on their own more easily.

Regards,

Peter