The website was made with help from d/Deaf, Disabled, and Neurodivergent artists.

These artists helped decide how  this website should look and work.

This page discusses the Accessibility of the website, in Plain English, so it is easier to read.

Black and white image of Access Icon, a human figure in a circle

The website - 

  • Uses clear headings and layout to help people, and screen readers, understand the text
  • Has short sections of text and pictures to help understanding  
  • Avoids pop-ups and videos that play automatically  
  • Uses dark colours on light backgrounds (not bright white)  
  • Uses large, easy-to-read fonts  
  • Lets people make the text bigger  
  • Uses bold, underline, and italics to help follow the text  
  • Uses plain English (not hard academic words)  
  • Has ALT text (image descriptions) for pictures  
  • Has captions and transcripts for videos  
  • Has Auslan interpretation for some videos

We made this website using a tool called Omeka S. Omeka Se is a free software that many people help to build and improve. It helped us make a website with more than 10,000 items you can search, within our budget.

People told us this was a good tool to use to build this website because - 

  • It works with screen readers.
  • In the main pages - Home, About This Website, About This Project, and so on - it lets us put in descriptive hyperlinks, which say what they link to, to help screen reader users navigate through the pages.
  • In the rest of the pages, which share interviews and other documents we have collected, the website works with the same structure on each Item page. It starts with an Identifier number, then TItle, and Relations to Places, Organizations, Creative Works, and People, followed by other information, like the Description of what is in a document. Then there are links to Media like URLs or PDFS.
  • Not all the Item pages have all of these categories listed.
  • Some Items have only a few related Persons, Organizations, or Creative Works.
  • Some have a lot, and there is a long list of People, Organizations, and Creative works to click through to and learn more about.

The software does not have all the things the Disability Arts community wanted on the website. For example, users cannot change the font or switch between light and dark mode.

Most of the Access problems happen because the website shares old documents:

  • Some files are scans of photocopied documents from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s which we are sharing as PDF documents
  • These are hard for screen readers to read  
    • We looked into and tested ways to fix this problem
    • We learned that, if we prepared our PDFs in a particular way, Adobe Acrobat's 'Read Aloud' tool can read some of the PDFs
      • It reads the "High Beam Festival 1998" Flyer well, but does not say that the frames around the text are yellow
      • It reads the "Arts Access Victoria Newsletter August 1995" with mistakes, because the images are flattened, and the layout uses columns
      • It does not read the "Arts Project Australia 1986 Flyer" at all, because the text is part of a flattened image
    • We did not have time, money, or people to type out all the words, and list all the pictures, in more than 1,000 historical documents, when 'Read Aloud' did not work
      • So, instead, we wrote a short summary of the content for each PDF
        • We put this summary into the Description for each Item in our records, and the Accessibility Tags for each PDF file, so users would know the content
    • In the year before we published the website, we saw the introduction of smart computers, which can extract text from these PDF files for users.
      • We tested one of these, Microsoft CoPilot, asking it to 'Extract text from this page. Include title, metadata, and image descriptions as relevant.' It often did this fairly well. It sometimes did a summary instead of the real text. It sometimes made mistakes. This meant, when we launched the website, it would not have saved time or money to use this.

We explain al of this on the Access page, the Terminology, Scope, and Future Development page, and the Credits and Acknowledgements page.

Each of these pages also has a Plain English version.

At the end of the Access page, there is a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Conformance Statement. It explains what the website creators have done to follow rules that help make websites easier for people with disabilities to use. It says which rules the website follows fully, which rulles it follows partly, and how this affects users.

This website follows Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA rules as much as possible. Some parts meet the rules fully. Some meet the rules only partly, because of the limits in the tools and budget to describe the PDF documents.