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Whitfield County Web Site Accessible to Blind and Deaf | WDEF News 12 | News, Weather and Sports for Chattanooga and the Tennessee Valley
Whitfield County officials have said in the past that they want to be as transparent as possible when it comes to sharing information with the public.
To make sure the visually and hearing impaired can take full advantage of the county’s Web site, Whitfield County Information Technology Senior Network Analyst Tim Warnix has worked hard the past few weeks adding special behind-the-scenes code to make sure the site meets accessibility standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium.
“I don’t think our information should be exclusive to anybody,” Warnix said. “I think everybody should have access to the county’s information regardless of handicap.”
Here’s how it works.
Using special equipment, a blind or deaf person surfs the Web as usual and finds the Whitfield County site(Whitfield County, Georgia Official Site). When the equipment comes across an image on the site, it finds alternate text that it reads aloud to the blind person.
“When the text reader comes to an image, naturally the person can’t see it, but they can hear the description of the image – like this is a logo of the Whitfield County seal, this is a photo of so-and-so, this is such-and-such logo,” Warnix said.
“We don’t have any audio on our site, but accessibility standards will also convert any audio files into text that a deaf person can read on the screen,” Warnix said. “Also, if there’s a video on the site, the person can watch the video and then something sort of like closed captioning will pop up and they can read what’s being said.”
The county’s site has between 400 and 500 pages, so Warnix says the changeover to meet accessibility standards for all the pages will take some time.
“We have a lot of pages, so we have to go in and make sure each individual page is accessible,” he said. “Right now, the redesign is in process for all the pages, but it’s just a long drawn-out process to do that. Eventually they all will be accessible.”
Warnix says he has run a test on the home page, citizens page, business page, and visitors page, and all four of those pages meet accessibility standards.
“It’s really a challenge to make sure that you do meet all the standards in general, but also a challenge to try to meet all the accessibility standards to meet the needs of everybody who might be accessing the Web site,” he said.
Warnix recently unveiled a new overall look for the county’s website and says it’s been well received by the public.
“The way the Web site was before, we had a few things on the home page,” he said. “But what we wanted to do was put as much information right up front on the home page as we possibly could and still keep it as clean as we could, not clutter it up. I know from my own standpoint and from reading reviews of other websites, most people don’t like to scroll a long way to look at a web page. They like to see it all right there in front of them.”
The new look also includes horizontal slide-out menus that are easier to navigate, he said, “where they were vertical and it was kind of hard to go vertical, then horizontal, then vertical again (with the drop-down menus). Now when you run over a button, everything just goes down, down, down.”
It’s all part of the county Information Technology Department’s goal to make the site as user-friendly as possible “because we don’t want to turn people off from the site – we want to attract people to the site,” Warnix said. “So the more accessible, the more information, the more attractive we can make the site, the better off we are.”
He also noted that the county hosts its own Web site. “That means when a county worker sends something to be posted to the site, it’s on there almost immediately,” Warnix said. “Whereas if you host your site remotely on another site or you get another company to do the maintenance, it can take 24 to 48 hours for new information to get posted.”
That delay can be detrimental if time-sensitive material or a correction to an earlier post need to be added to the site.
“If someone sends us some information to post and there was an error in that information, I can go in immediately and correct that error and it’s not out there for 24 to 48 hours before it gets corrected. That’s a big advantage to having everything in house.”
Whitfield County officials have said in the past that they want to be as transparent as possible when it comes to sharing information with the public.
To make sure the visually and hearing impaired can take full advantage of the county’s Web site, Whitfield County Information Technology Senior Network Analyst Tim Warnix has worked hard the past few weeks adding special behind-the-scenes code to make sure the site meets accessibility standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium.
“I don’t think our information should be exclusive to anybody,” Warnix said. “I think everybody should have access to the county’s information regardless of handicap.”
Here’s how it works.
Using special equipment, a blind or deaf person surfs the Web as usual and finds the Whitfield County site(Whitfield County, Georgia Official Site). When the equipment comes across an image on the site, it finds alternate text that it reads aloud to the blind person.
“When the text reader comes to an image, naturally the person can’t see it, but they can hear the description of the image – like this is a logo of the Whitfield County seal, this is a photo of so-and-so, this is such-and-such logo,” Warnix said.
“We don’t have any audio on our site, but accessibility standards will also convert any audio files into text that a deaf person can read on the screen,” Warnix said. “Also, if there’s a video on the site, the person can watch the video and then something sort of like closed captioning will pop up and they can read what’s being said.”
The county’s site has between 400 and 500 pages, so Warnix says the changeover to meet accessibility standards for all the pages will take some time.
“We have a lot of pages, so we have to go in and make sure each individual page is accessible,” he said. “Right now, the redesign is in process for all the pages, but it’s just a long drawn-out process to do that. Eventually they all will be accessible.”
Warnix says he has run a test on the home page, citizens page, business page, and visitors page, and all four of those pages meet accessibility standards.
“It’s really a challenge to make sure that you do meet all the standards in general, but also a challenge to try to meet all the accessibility standards to meet the needs of everybody who might be accessing the Web site,” he said.
Warnix recently unveiled a new overall look for the county’s website and says it’s been well received by the public.
“The way the Web site was before, we had a few things on the home page,” he said. “But what we wanted to do was put as much information right up front on the home page as we possibly could and still keep it as clean as we could, not clutter it up. I know from my own standpoint and from reading reviews of other websites, most people don’t like to scroll a long way to look at a web page. They like to see it all right there in front of them.”
The new look also includes horizontal slide-out menus that are easier to navigate, he said, “where they were vertical and it was kind of hard to go vertical, then horizontal, then vertical again (with the drop-down menus). Now when you run over a button, everything just goes down, down, down.”
It’s all part of the county Information Technology Department’s goal to make the site as user-friendly as possible “because we don’t want to turn people off from the site – we want to attract people to the site,” Warnix said. “So the more accessible, the more information, the more attractive we can make the site, the better off we are.”
He also noted that the county hosts its own Web site. “That means when a county worker sends something to be posted to the site, it’s on there almost immediately,” Warnix said. “Whereas if you host your site remotely on another site or you get another company to do the maintenance, it can take 24 to 48 hours for new information to get posted.”
That delay can be detrimental if time-sensitive material or a correction to an earlier post need to be added to the site.
“If someone sends us some information to post and there was an error in that information, I can go in immediately and correct that error and it’s not out there for 24 to 48 hours before it gets corrected. That’s a big advantage to having everything in house.”