The Jodi Mattes Web accessibility Awards were established in 2003, European Year of Disabled People, to celebrate the most accessible museum, gallery and heritage website. This year sees the awards opening to nominations from libraries and archives too.
The Awards will be for a museum, gallery, library, archive or heritage website which demonstrates active commitment to meeting web accessibility standards, involves users and develops practical and imaginative ways of making cultural and learning resources accessible to disabled people. The Awards are for websites developed in England.
There will be two Awards:
- Award for a low budget website which best demonstrates what can be achieved through commitment by smaller organisations
- Award for excellence open to all organisations.
The National Maritime Museum (www.nmm.ac.uk) was the 2004 winner and the Tate Modern imap website (www.tate.org.uk/imap) was commended for innovation in making collections accessible to disabled people.
The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) is co-ordinating the Award, in association with the Museums Computer Group and Leicester University Museum Studies Department. City University's Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design has been commissioned to undertake user testing of nominations.
Many disabled people face substantial access barriers to websites. The Awards aim to raise awareness of the need for inclusive web design, E-government 2005 policies - which require that public sector websites meet world web accessibility standards (Level AA); and the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) - which requires that reasonable adjustments are made to provide equal access to websites for disabled people.
To determine how accessible your website is, please contact us. For further details on making your website accessible, visit the Disability Rights Commission or read our report on 8 benefits of Accessible web sites.
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