Klimaschutz Frankfurt in easy read
Klimaschutz (climate protection) Frankfurt in easy read is aimed at people with cognitive impairments or poor language skills.
The Climate Department of the City of Frankfurt has commissioned svaerm to develop a website in easy read, where climate protection measures in Frankfurt are to be communicated in an easily understandable way.
An excerpt from the subpage Tips on climate protection in easy read.
Objectives
- Enabling social participation for people with cognitive or motor disabilities, learning difficulties or poor language skills
- Contributing to climate protection
- Compliance with legal requirements (BITV 2.0)
Implementation and Features
The project is implemented as a fully mobile responsive website. It can be used on a PC, tablet or smartphone and scales according to the window or screen size of the device. There is only one common code base, which saves on maintenance work: The desktop and mobile versions do not have to be maintained separately. The climate department can add new web pages and change content in-house at any time, or send change requests to svaerm.
klimaschutz-frankfurt.de is a WordPress multisite. There is a database for the German language, one for the English language (launch to follow) and one for easy read. A link in the header menu allows switching between the languages.
At svaerm, we treat easy read like a foreign language. The texts come from a trained copywriter who validates the text with a test group consisting of people who come right from the target group.
Easy read follows certain rules, for example, sentences are kept short and hyphens are inserted for certain compound nouns. Sometimes it may also involve going against spelling rules or writing words as they are spoken to make the text more accessible.
For example, “Postauto” (postbus) and “klimafreundlich” (climate friendly) are written with a hyphen to make them easier to read and understand.
The images can be enlarged with a mouse click. When editing the images, we took care to select easily recognizable, self-explanatory designs that are well matched with the text. We avoided photos that were too dark, too small or too abstract. In addition, many of the pictures have local ties to Frankfurt. All designs were approved by the test group.
To reduce accessibility issues, we have made the header menu fully keyboard-operable using ARIA markup. This is of benefit to people suffering of, for example, Parkinson’s or other motor impairments.
If a user without motor, cognitive or linguistic impairments “gets lost” on the easy read website, there is a clearly visible “Leave easy read” button in the header. The mobile header menu has “In easy read” added to Orientation.
Scope
The Klimaschutz Frankfurt in easy read site consists of one Homepage with a presentation of the climate department, 9 collections of tips (1x general, 8x on specific topics such as climate-friendly heating, climate-friendly cleaning, climate protection in the garden, etc.) and a Glossary explaining in an accessible way any difficult words relating to climate protection.
When launching accessible websites (link coming soon), it is not always necessary to make all the content of the original website accessible – the accessible content can be expanded at any time.
What is required is a Declaration of Accessibility which summarizes what is already accessible, what will be optimized at a later date and a reason why the focus was placed on certain content. It is often better to make part of the content accessible in the short term in this way instead of immediately announcing the “big fix,” which will not be ready until much later.
The exact scope must be individually coordinated and compared with the legal requirements for accessible websites. These vary from customer to customer, depending on whether it is a public authority, an online store, a bank, an insurance company and so on.
Contact option for companies and public institutions
Would you also like to implement a website or content in easy read or barrier-free? As an agency for accessible websites we will gladly advise you. Please feel free to contact us for a non-binding and uncomplicated first inquiry using the contact form below. We can then arrange an appointment to get to know each other over the phone, in a video call or on site.
