69 of the 70 websites of Vinnytsia local authorities have accessibility issues – monitoring

69 out of the 70 official websites of Vinnytsia communities have accessibility issues, meaning that the information on these resources may be partially or completely inaccessible to people with disabilities and the elderly, according to the report the Vinnytsia Oblast Military Administration (OMA) issued after monitoring the official websites of the OMA, the district military administrations and the oblast's territorial communities.

The monitoring was carried out in the second to fourth quarters of 2023. 70 websites were checked according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) method (guidelines for evaluating web accessibility) for half a year. Ukraine joined the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in 2019.

The websites were checked according to 10 criteria:

• sufficient text contrast;
• alternative text for all images;
• accessible text for all hyperlinks;
• text labels for all buttons;
• text labels for form fields;
• programmatically determined default language of the page;
• no errors in the page code;
• quick transition to the main content of the page;
• keyboard focus marking;
• support for keyboard control.

The websites were assigned 1 point for each parameter if everything was fine and 0 if a requirement was not met.

The results showed that only one of the 70 examined websites can be given the maximum score of basic accessibility (10 points). In total, 4.3% of the websites (three sites) ranked high, 7% (five websites) were sufficient, 55.7% (39 websites) had medium basic accessibility, and 33% (23 websites) ranked low.

According to the report, the accessibility issues of the examined websites were mostly related to the lack of the following components:

• sufficient text contrast;
• alternative text for all images;
• accessible text for all hyperlinks;
• programmatically determined default language of the page;
• quick transition to the main content of the page.

"These criteria are the least implemented. The degree of their implementation varies from 5.7% to 24.3%. 100% compliance was only achieved for two criteria: keyboard focus marking and keyboard control support," the report by the Vinnytsia OMA says.

The official websites of the Vinnytsia OMA (10 points), the Bratslav territorial community (9 points) and the Ladyzhyn city territorial community (9 points) scored high. The website of the Vinnytsia City Council scored 6.

Accessibility monitoring was carried out in accordance with the Region Action Plan 2023–2024 for the Implementation of the National Strategy for the Creation of a Barrier-Free Space in Ukraine until 2030.