…Persons with disabilities having greater access to gov’t services
…want more government websites to be accessible

ROSEMARIE RAMITT is a teacher by profession. She works with visually impaired students, to prepare them for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations. She herself has a visual impairment.

“I do everything on my computer,” Ramitt told the Guyana Chronicle. Through the use of specialised software, like Jaws- which is a computer screen reader programme, she has been able to access many digital services, making her life much easier.

Resultantly, she related, “It’s really just getting used to the device in terms of how to use and learning how it benefits you, in terms of all the things that it can do.”

However, the challenge that exists for her is that though efforts have been made to place key government services online, these services have not been crafted in a way that is always compatible with the software that assists visually impaired persons.

Giving a practical demonstration, she tried logging into the University of Guyana (UG)’s student portal. With the help of a screen reader, she was able to get into the student portal and input her unique user identification number (ID). However, she forgot her password.

Normally, this isn’t a huge problem; there is a feature that exists that would send a message to the email you provided, which would subsequently allow you to reset the password. Ramitt did this, but before she could complete the process of resetting her password, there was an added security feature that required her to type the characters displayed.

As a visually impaired person, there was no way that she would do this on her own. As such, she was unable to reset her password and could not access her UG student account.

The challenge encountered by Ramitt is one which many Persons with Disabilities (PWDs), particularly those who are visually and hearing impaired, face in accessing web services. To address this, this International Telecommunications Union (ITU) crafted an “Internet for @ll” programme, which seeks to equip governments and other stakeholders with the skills to make web services more accessible.

“Accessible Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are necessary to ensure that all citizens have access to public information and communication and public services, such as health; e-government, emergency, etc,” ITU Senior Programme Officer, Roxana Iliescu, said.

Illiescu noted that though ICT is present in every aspect of life, not every person is readily able to access the technology. And according to her, digital inclusion must be a fundamental part of a country’s developmental agenda. “Digital inclusion means the empowerment of people through ICT,” Iliescu explained. “It is the ability of persons to access ICTs.”

In so doing, the ITU officer noted that PWDs would benefit from greater socio-economic empowerment of PWDs, which would, in turn, contribute to wider national development.
During the past week, ICT experts from the ITU were in Guyana training ICT specialists and officers from various government ministries and the University of Guyana to enhance digital public services, so that it could be accessible for PWDs.

“The participants basically received the knowledge needed in terms of making sure that the sites we have for government ministries and agencies are in such a position that any person with a visual impairment or so can use the site,” Web Services Coordinator at the Ministry of Public Telecommunications, Jaime Skeete, explained.

During this training, the participants were specifically exposed to the creation and remediation of accessibility for digital content- to make documents and files more accessible, and in web development and web design- to make the websites which encompass the files more accessible for PWDs.

In the case of the UG student portal Rosemarie tried to access, a “sound” feature could be integrated too as part of the security measures. Here, in addition to there being the feature of typing the characters seen, there could be an option where she can input the sounds she hears. This is just one way of making online services more accessible. Skeete further explained that the websites for government ministries and agencies were assessed to see just how accessible they were and subsequently, recommendations were made by the ITU experts as to how these can be improved. These would include making the sites more accessible for screen readers, increasing font sizes and colour contrasts- for visually impaired persons; and captioning multimedia content- for hearing impaired persons.

And throughout this process, PWDs- including Rosemarie- were there to ‘test out’ the services and their subsequent improvements. Public Telecommunications Minister, Cathy Hughes, had previously said that close to 200 government services will be placed online as her ministry is continuing its work to expand access to ICT countrywide. It is envisioned that all citizens, regardless of any differences in capabilities, ethnicity, age or otherwise, would be able to equitably access these services.

The “Internet for @ll” Programme is in line with ITU Plenipotentiary Resolution 200 ‘Connect 2020 Agenda for Global Telecommunication/ICT Development’ and ITU Strategic Goal to ensure ICT is accessible to PWDs. The programme is focused on two fundamental aspects: national political buy-in, which came in the form of the government (through the Public Telecommunications) and other stakeholders subscribing to the programme; and capacity building, which was the week long training session.

Jaime also highlighted that through the collaboration with the ITU, government ministries are now mandated to make their digital services more accessible to PWDs. Furthermore, he noted that the participants must now head back to their respective ministries and agencies to develop their services to the necessary levels of accessibility.

“There is a one-month period where each participant will communicate directly to the ITU experts to bring their digital content up to this standard,” Jaime said. “Once the ITU experts are satisfied [with the developments made to the websites] then the participants will gain the certification to say that they have been able to build accessible websites.”

But the work in making these services more accessible doesn’t just stop here. An added dimension to the programme is that it has been crafted with a “self-sustainable model”, through which UG will now develop this programme with the course content provided by the ITU and have other stakeholders trained to improve their web services. In the next few weeks, personnel from the university’s Computer Science department will develop the course for persons to receive training in.

“[Making the web services more accessible] is a requirement for government ministries, but folks like the private sector and so are encouraged to do the same,” Skeete related.

“For the past two years, technology for PWDs in Guyana has really grown,” Rosemarie contended. However, she also shared: “I would like to see a lot more websites that are accessible, especially government websites because we depend on those for information and services and we need to have access to that kind of critical information.”