Archive for Birmingham City Council

Pesky People successes

We are a newly formed company led by Disabled people (Director Alison Smith). Alison has 17+ years experience working in the cultural sector and now works as a freelance arts consultant. Pesky People was set up as a direct response to the Digital Britain report and its exclusion of Disabled and Deaf people. It continues to campaign about the need for full accessibility to websites, digital content and products. Since we started on 1 September 2009... 
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Disabled protest at Birmingham City Council ignored

Yesterday’s protest by Direct Action Network (DAN) against Birmingham City Council comes hot on the heals of criticism of the £2.8 million spent on the BCC website. DAN protested at BCC’s failure to fulfil it’s legal obligations to enable disabled people to live independently through direct payments system called The Independent Living Fund. Despite it being a legal requirement to offer such assessments. Check out some of demo pictures.... 
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How to navigate Birmingham City Council's website – go to the BBC

Birmingham City Council (BCC) spends a massive £2.8m on a website and they can’t even basic requirements around Accessibility right. They even send us off to the BBC to find out how to navigate their own site. Yet one of the aims of their Disability Equality Duty (2007-2010) is to: ‘mainstream disability equality within the City Council’s service areas’ Launched at the beginning of the week my response as one of the ‘Twitterati’... 
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Birmingham City Council launches new £3M inaccessible website

Today I witnessed Birmingham City Council change it’s tune from singing it was fully compliant with the W3C guidelines ‘We are pleased to announce that this web site meets with W3C WAI-AA and WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards.’ to quietly saying it ‘aims to meet’ them [changed at 09.30]. This retraction less than 10 hours after going live on a website costing over £2.4 million+ and we believe a direct result of our responses... 
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