CWACking on with it: New Zealand Government's open source accessibility testing software programme
Time: Wednesday 13th May 12:20-12:50
Room: Te Aro
Track: Web Tools & Complementary Technologies
The Centralised Web Accessibility Checker, or CWAC, is open-source software created by the New Zealand Government Chief Digital Officer (GCDO). It scans websites for accessibility issues to help ensure that government web content can be used by disabled people. CWAC tests several things, but primarily checks for failures to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, something that government agencies continue to find challenging. Being open source, we didn’t need to procure any IT and the project required minimal budget. CWAC is open to developer contributions from the community, and is free and available for government agencies and others to use. Results from the CWAC scans of NZ Government websites are openly published as open data on Data.govt.nz. The greatest challenge has been presenting and translating the results into action for agencies that often outsource the bulk of their IT needs.
Speakers
Jason Kiss
Jason is a Web Standards Consultant at the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) where he advises on web accessibility and the NZ Government Web Standards. Working with the web for over 25 years, Jason is is a past W3C Advisory Committee representative for the New Zealand Government, and a previous editor of the HTML Accessibility API Mappings specification.
Additional speakersIf desired, Ackama (working with the NZ Government on CWAC) can supply a second speaker to support the open source angle and provide some developer input on the topic.