Swedish authorities had until 22 September 2020 to fulfil the requirements, so the law has now come into effect for real.
"We don't want to be a university that excludes people, so I can't emphasise enough the importance of working on our accessibility," says Vice-Chancellor Hans Adolfsson.
So how does the University fare?
A large amount of the digital content provided by the University is already accessible, but we are still nowhere near completion. The system setup used for the external website umu.se fulfils the international standard WCAG 2.1 which is what it takes to abide by the law. Yet, a lot of web content does not. The law means that both web pages and documents published on those pages must be accessible. Other contents that is not text, such as photos, films, animations and audio recordings, must also be described using text. This means, for instance, that videos must be subtitled in the language spoken and not just contain audio and speech. The same also goes for the learning platform Canvas – that is to say that the system is accessible, but the content is not.
How can the University be digitally accessible?
Everyone at the University who writes or in other ways produces content to be published online or in other ways be displayed digitally are affected by this law. This is why the University started an institution-wide project earlier this autumn to develop new ways of working and tools that can simplify for some of the activities necessary. An important aim of the project is that it is supposed to be easy to do the right thing, and the tools must therefore aid in reducing the extra workload to a minimum for affected members of staff.
What happens to content that is not accessible yet, will the University be punished?
The law is fresh so no one has yet undergone a full scrutiny. Nevertheless, it is always punishable to break a law. Everyone who produces content that is or will be digitally available should work as focused as possible, not only to comply with the law but most importantly because it is desirable that everyone who wants to should be able to access our digital content. Until we have reached the goal line, one way of facilitating for people is to always provide a link to a contact person that users who need certain information in another format can contact and the need in question can be processed.
Read more about the project