Walking the talk: Creating an accessible video about web accessibility

Soft music plays in the background.

At the top of a black screen is the logo for Te Kāwanatanga o Aotearoa New Zealand Government. Underneath the logo is the text ‘Why is web accessibility important?’.

Cut to Callum McMenamin. On-screen text reads ‘Callum McMenamin, Principal Advisor Accessibility, Hīkina Whakatutuki, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’.

Callum McMenamin: “I spend a lot of time on the internet, you know, in my job and in my personal life, and I encounter a wide range of how accessible those systems are. There are some systems that I basically can’t use at all.”

Cut to Daniel Harborne. On-screen text reads ‘Daniel Harborne, NZSL Information and Resources Team Leader, Deaf Aotearoa’.

[Daniel Harborne uses New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL). Here, he communicates through an NZSL interpreter who translates between NZSL and English.]

Daniel Harborne (in NZSL): “If information is relevant to me — I’m a New Zealand citizen, I’m living here — I should be able to expect at bare minimum that there would be captions to videos.”

Cut to a black screen. On the left half of the screen is a blue circle. One quarter of the circle changes colour to yellow. To the right, symbols for visual, hearing, mobility and learning impairments are displayed in sequence.

Narrator: Almost a quarter of New Zealanders self-identify as disabled. They have one or more long term visual, hearing, mobility or learning impairments.

Cut to Paul James. On-screen text reads ‘Paul James, Government Chief Digital Officer, Chief Executive, Digital Public Service, Te Tari Taiwhenua Department of Internal Affairs’.

Paul James: “New Zealanders with disabilities are our whānau, they’re our kaimahi and they’re our customers. So we provide, as New Zealand government, information and services to New Zealanders and they have an entitlement to that information and services as well.”

Cut to Ann-Marie Cavanagh. On-screen text reads ‘Ann-Marie Cavanagh, Deputy Chief Executive, Digital Public Service, Te Tari Taiwhenua Department of Internal Affairs’.

Ann-Marie Cavanagh: “We know that over half of New Zealanders over 65 are disabled, so it’s critical that we make sure that our content that’s delivered through our online channels is easily accessible and that we’re not excluding those communities or those parts of the New Zealand community.”

Cut to footage of a blind person using a computer with a refreshable braille display.

Narrator: “Disabled people often use special hardware and software called assistive technologies that help them access and interact with web content. Sometimes disabled people need content to be in a certain format, such as captions on a video or sign language translation.”

Cut to Daniel Harborne (in NZSL): “And I thought with the COVID situation, when they brought the interpreters on and they were talking about, tonight we’re going to be locking down the country, you know, things are going to be closing. I remember thinking, okay, I need to go and get some food. I quickly dashed out, went to the supermarket, made sure I had enough food. If I hadn’t had an interpreter on screen at that time and I had to read it in the newspaper the next day, or watch the 6 o’clock news the next day to finally have access to know that everything shut, I would have then gone to the supermarket and the shelves would have been empty by then.”

Cut to footage of a web browser navigating from a page on the NZ Government Web Standards, to a page on the Web Accessibility Standard, to the W3C’s page on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.

Narrator: “The New Zealand Government Web Accessibility Standard requires that public service departments make their websites accessible. This means that each web page needs to meet the internationally recognised Web Content Accessibility Guidelines from the W3C.”

Cut to Ann-Marie Cavanagh: “So it would be important, I think, for agencies to ensure that as you’re building out your digital service delivery and your online service delivery to really start from the get-go to include those New Zealanders with disabilities in that co-creation process.”

Cut to Paul James: “It’s really important that leaders and everyone involved in this work takes a sense of responsibility and obligation to make sure that we do hit those standards of accessibility so that all New Zealanders, including those with disabilities, can access the information and services.”

Cut to Callum McMenamin: “I don’t think everything’s ever going to be perfect. I think it’s always going to take constant effort to make things accessible in the same way it takes constant effort to make information secure and to respect privacy regulations. It takes constant effort, constant expertise. I don’t think there’s going to be a lack of work any time soon.”

Cut to a black screen. At the bottom is the logo for Te Tari Taiwhenua Department of Internal Affairs. Above the logo is the text ‘learn more at digital.govt.nz’.

Fade to black.

At the top of a black screen is the logo for Te Kāwanatanga o Aotearoa New Zealand Government. Underneath the logo is the text ‘How can government organisations raise accessibility levels?’.

Cut to Callum McMenamin. On-screen text reads ‘Callum McMenamin, Principal Advisor Accessibility, Hīkina Whakatutuki, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.’

Callum McMenamin: “So one thing that we’re seeing in government right now is some agencies are hiring accessibility experts and I think it can really help push the agenda of accessibility within public sector organisations to have, like, a principal advisor for accessibility, which is my role. And then that allows me to sort of champion that within the organisation. Some of it is creating that kind of cultural shift almost to increase the visibility of accessibility and to get people to really care about it.

“So one other example is MSD [the Ministry of Social Development], for instance, is creating an entire accessibility team. They’re going to be hiring up to 12 people, I think, just to focus on the accessibility of MSD’s systems. So that could be one strategy for the public service to really improve accessible outcomes. It allows more people to specialise in the field and improve their knowledge, and I think that is extremely important for helping everybody because then you’ve got, you know, a central contact person or even a team who can answer all of your questions, who can provide leadership and strategy for how to improve the accessibility of things.”

Cut to a black screen. At the bottom is the logo for Te Tari Taiwhenua Department of Internal Affairs. Above the logo is the text ‘learn more at digital.govt.nz’.

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At the top of a black screen is the logo for Te Kāwanatanga o Aotearoa New Zealand Government. Underneath the logo is the text ‘Web accessibility and PDF documents’.

Cut to Callum McMenamin. On-screen text reads ‘Callum McMenamin, Principal Advisor Accessibility, Hīkina Whakatutuki, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.’

Callum McMenamin: “What I see a lot of is the public service pumps out a hell of a lot of PDF files. And this isn’t unique to New Zealand either. It’s a problem that governments all around the world have tackled with.

“Some people claim that you can make an accessible PDF, but I dispute that. So the majority of people access the web on their phones and their mobile devices. Often PDFs are designed to be the size of an A4 sheet of paper or even A3. So when that’s shrunk down to the size of a phone screen, it becomes this impossible-to-read little file and you’ve got to zoom in and pan around in order to read it. It’s just an awful experience and I sort of think when we publish PDFs, we’re completely ignoring what people do when they access government content — that they use their phones for the majority of those interactions. So it’s very important to focus on how people are actually accessing content.

“The other thing is, if you’re using an iPhone or Android device, and if you’re blind or low vision or have a reading disability and you use screen reader software, screen reader software doesn’t work very well with PDF files at all. The only instance where they kind of work okay is on Windows with Adobe Acrobat installed. Any other situation and you’re out of luck. So you’d sort of have to ignore reality in order to think that PDF files are a good way of communicating.

“I know that the World Bank, for instance, has done some research on who actually downloads and reads PDFs on a website. They found that around a third of their published PDFs were downloaded zero times. So there’s a lot of data out there and evidence that suggests when people see a PDF file to download, they just don’t do it. So if you publish in PDF only, you’re most likely communicating to no one.”

Cut to a black screen. At the bottom is the logo for Te Tari Taiwhenua Department of Internal Affairs. Above the logo is the text ‘learn more at digital.govt.nz’.

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At the top of a black screen is the logo for Te Kāwanatanga o Aotearoa New Zealand Government. Underneath the logo is the text ‘Sign language is a language, not a literal translation’.

Cut to Daniel Harborne. On-screen text reads ‘Daniel Harborne, NZSL Information and Resources Team Leader, Deaf Aotearoa’.

Daniel Harborne: “It’s important to remember that sign language is its own language. It’s very different from English. So when someone’s using sign language, they’re not following an English word order. They’re not signing to an English grammatical structure. Sign language has its own grammatical structure. It has its own ways of using language. And so, for example, what might be said in a sentence in English can be just said in a few signs in sign language and what might be said in 5 words in English might be needing to be expanded in sign language, because they’re concepts that you’re working from, rather than following a certain grammatical structure. So they are very different languages.

“So that means for a lot of Deaf people that they’re not fluent in English. Their literacy wouldn’t be the same. They wouldn’t have the same literacy ability in English as they would have in use of sign language. So there’s some people whose language level might be a lot younger than their physical age. But I think, you know, being able to have accessibility in both English and sign language is important.

“But then you’re talking about another language again, which is kind of like, you know, the language that people within the government might use because there’s complicated ideas that are being used. There’s quite a lot of jargon, there’s quite a lot of specific terms that are really relevant for government. And I’ve noticed some of those words when I’m reading them, I go, I’ve seen that word before, but I’m not sure the meaning of that when they’re using it within, you know, within that intention, within that sentence.

“So I’m really having to think about that when I’m providing accessibility for the Deaf community in sign language. I want to make sure, you know, I’ve done the research, I want to make sure that I’ve got the right definition of that word and the intention they’re using it as, within their use, so it’s put into sign language as well, equally.”

Cut to a black screen. At the bottom is the logo for Te Tari Taiwhenua Department of Internal Affairs. Above the logo is the text ‘learn more at digital.govt.nz’.

Fade to black.