Broken Hill City Council Increases Digital Inclusion and Accessibility for Community and Businesses

Making sure that digital technology grows in ways that serve all users is a critical concern for countries around the world. New South Wales’ Disability Inclusion Act addresses this need, requiring that city councils increase accessibility in their online interactions that meet the needs of those who require extra assistance due to a variety of issues.

BHCC found that their website accessibility was a target area for improvement to meet the Act’s requirements. As with many other councils addressing this issue, BHCC developed a four-year action plan to make their website accessible and inclusive to their entire community.

“We didn’t just want to make services available online. We wanted to make them effectively available online,” Jade Symes, Digital and Marketing Officer for BHCC, said.

While BHCC already had some online access functionality, the way the services were integrated often created more problems than solutions.

The Broken Hill team began searching for a new website platform that would offer the accessibility features they needed and be easy for staff to use. OpenCities provided an intuitive platform that was WCAG 2.0 AA (now 2.1 AA) compliant and included features that gave the council the power to:

• Provide content in different languages
• Make certain that links are never broken with a broken link checker and an internal URL forwarder
• Be mobile-first
• Structure website content for accessibility and add image ALT tags, allowing text-to-speech solutions

With an older population, many of the staff members at BHCC were related to, or personally connected to someone in the community who needed diversity, disability, or inclusion services. Their hearts were in their work, which helped them thrive during training exercises that focused on skills that would make their new website accessible.

The impact of the COVID-19 outbreak also provided an opportunity to develop those services in a time when digital interaction wasn’t just a luxury, it was a necessity.

“We were fortunate to have been well established with our OpenCities website when the pandemic hit, so we were able to accelerate our transition to digital-first service delivery. Our website provided an accessible staging area for those services when they were needed most,” she added.

Since integrating OpenCities in their digital experience, BHCC has seen strong growth in both the number of services offered to residents digitally and the impact that it has on the community.

“When we focused on creating a high-level user experience, it removed the barriers to entry and access for all of our users. We started to understand that when we built better online experiences using the features in OpenCities, we covered everything, including accessibility,” Symes said.

Where previously BHCC had a dozen digital services available on their website, residents can now find over 140 services online. The shift has saved the council over $25,000 in staff resources and hours spent previously helping residents with council services in person.

Accessibility has also increased. Staff training on accessible design has led to significant upgrades. Integration of technical tools has also made it easier, for example, to use text-to-speech software when visually impaired users visit the website for news releases or other information.

But the digital transformation has made impacts beyond just accessibility and the new approach to digital-first strategies also has shifted how the council approaches their business.

That relationship impact is also being seen in how BHCC can assist other community groups and businesses. The Maari Ma Indigenous Art Awards and Pro Hart Outback Art Prize, both sponsored by BHCC, celebrate the work of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, and media that reflects the spirit and diversity of the land, respectively. Integrating information and calls for entries for these two awards into their updated digital services saw a dramatic leap in interest both throughout Australia and internationally. Entries jumped from 20 in 2016 to over 450 in the most recent year’s process.

“It’s not only led to a corresponding increase in the quality of art submitted, but these are now considered significant Australian art prizes with winners being exhibited in a major gallery in Sydney,” Symes commented.

The success of the shift has also proven to change cultural assumptions. “While the Maari Ma prize is still served by community workers, people previously thought that Indigenous artists couldn’t access digital services. That has been proved very wrong thanks to the increasing number of entries into this prize now coming in through the council website,” she added.

Business has benefited as well. Thanks to the inclusion of film permit forms integrated into the website through OpenForms, film production companies are finding a different type of increased accessibility: easily completed forms.

With the cinematic heritage of the Broken Hill area, many production companies are interested in shooting in and around the area. But massive permit forms can be daunting. Production companies can complete and submit their permit forms for Broken Hill directly through their website. The difference has been noticeable.

“I’ve heard from industry folks that the film permit hosted on the website is one of the easiest to use in the industry,” Symes said. “I’m surprised because those forms are massive!”