Accessibility at CPABC
Overview
CPABC carries out its primary mission to protect the public by enforcing the highest professional and ethical standards. We are committed to continuing to become a more equitable, more diverse, and more inclusive organization, recognizing that this is an ongoing journey.
Ensuring that everyone who visits our website is able to access, navigate, and engage with our public content is critical to protecting the public. We strive to provide a user experience that supports and connects all British Columbians to important information related to the accounting profession.
Process
On January 15, 2022, CPABC set to work on making our two public websites (the corporate site and the PD site) compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA standards. To attain the level of knowledge required to lead this initiative, CPABC’s web production team completed extensive web accessibility training. Here is an overview of the other measures we’ve taken to help us achieve this objective:
- Launched a Web Accessibility Taskforce made up of one or more staff members from each department that produces content for our websites;
- Facilitated web accessibility training sessions for designated staff members from each department;
- Developed an internal web accessibility manual, documenting procedures and best practices for creating accessible web content;
- Educated the organization on web accessibility and provided quarterly updates on the initiative;
- Completed a full content and code audit of both websites and contracted a third-party web development company that was experienced with web accessibility to help implement all technical web accessibility updates.
- Performed frequent manual and automated testing using accessibility software (SiteImprove and Deque Axe) and assistive technologies such as screen readers and keyboard-only applications.
Compliancy
As of December 16, 2022, our public websites are more than 90% compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA standards. Our remaining task is to ensure that we have provided alternative, web-accessible formats for all PDFs on our public websites. This is the web team’s top priority for 2023.
Commitment
We know that web accessibility is not a one-time, two-year initiative. We are committed to maintaining our web accessibility standards, and we continue to perform regular accessibility testing on our public websites. We understand that there will always be more to learn, which is why we welcome all feedback from our website visitors. If you notice something that does not meet accessibility standards or have suggestions for further improvement, please email our web production team by clicking this link or by using the button below.