Law

I write monthly newsletters to all editors at TU Wien, inform them about important notions including information about web accessibility and I wrote a manual on what to do to make the websites accessible. I try to stay in contact with the editors and figure out why they don’t do what they are required to do by law.
By that, I was able to figure out what some problems are. Many did not know how to begin, because when your division has a large amount of sites, this is a gigantic task. Others did not even know what accessibility in web means or they did not understand the descriptions in my manual. To solve these problems I tried to adapt the descriptions and expand the available knowledge base and provided them with help.
Another problem is that many editors simply do not have the time in their day to day work to edit their whole website. In these cases, I cannot come up with a solution, because that has to be made by their supervisors or even higher management.
The last and sadly most common problem is that many people just ignore the mails or facts like the existing laws and they do not reply or communicate in any other way. My solution for that is that my supervisor will talk to the Vice Rector Digitalisation and Infrastructure and he will send an email with work instructions to the concerned editors.

Accessible Websites

According to the web accessibility act (“Web-Zugänglichkeits-Gesetz” – WZG) of the Austrian government, the websites of all the institutions that are funded by the government, as is TU Wien, have to be accessible according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). While the technical aspects are almost done, most of the editors have done nothing to make their areas accessible.
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