By: Rebecca Oestreich, Electronic Information Accessibility Coordinator, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) provides critical information to Minnesotans and its visitors about the state’s parks, trails, environment, and so much more. We work hard to ensure that all our website visitors can access our content so we were excited to find ourselves among the top five percent of the most accessible homepages in the world according to WebAIM, a nonprofit that provides web accessibility solutions. Our work didn’t happen overnight, of course. It’s the result of years of effort by many of our DNR and Minnesota IT Services (MNIT) staff and sustained support by our agency leadership.

In February 2020, WebAIM conducted an accessibility evaluation on the home pages of the top 1,000,000 web sites by using the automated web accessibility evaluation tool, WAVE.

The test found that the DNR homepage had zero accessibility errors, and WebAIM ranked DNR as 18,324 out of one million others. In February 2019, we were ranked as 88,261 out of one million.

While the test showed that we had zero accessibility errors, that does not mean that our homepage is fully accessible. Automated testing tools, like WAVE can only detect 25 percent to 35 percent of potential errors.  Manual testing is necessary to find the remaining issues.

Reaching the top of this list is a great accomplishment, but we'd be okay if everyone reading this article managed to beat us next year. By learning from each other, we can reduce accessibility errors and create a more equitable digital landscape. 

Want to join us in the top 5 percent? Here are a few tips that might help you on your journey.

Build Accessibility into your Process

When the DNR migrated to the content management system, Drupal, we had a unique opportunity to tackle website accessibility. Integrating accessibility into every step of this project made it manageable and ultimately successful.

“Accessibility is an important consideration when developing content and applications. It’s much more efficient to address accessibility from the start rather than trying to retrofit a product at the end,” said Steve Lime, Data and Applications Manager, MNIT Partnering with DNR.

Leadership and staff buy-in also made the process much smoother.

Continue to Improve

Our rank increased in 2020 because we take deliberate steps to continually improve our website accessibility. It is a journey rather than an end point. Don't expect perfection from day one, but actively make improvements over time.

We didn't catch everything right out of the gate. For example, here are some structural issues the DNR recently addressed:

• We added missing labels to the search and email signup forms.
• The Colour Contrast Analyser detected color contrast issues in the site header, which we fixed.
• To make the slideshow carousel more accessible, we integrated the PayPal Bootstrap Accessibility Plugin extension into the website. (Bootstrap is a popular framework for developing responsive and mobile-first websites.) 

Test

Periodic testing was part of the website migration process and continues today.

• Siteimprove continually crawls our website checking for accessibility errors, misspellings and broken links.
• When staff want to post something to the website, it is first checked for accessibility by gatekeepers who have gone through accessibility training. If it's not accessible, it is not posted.

Having an accessible website is not only the law, it’s the right thing to do. Together we can break down the online barriers for people with disabilities.

See you in the top 5 percent!