Mairie de Saint-Chamond

Saint-Chamond City Hall: This project allowed us to raise awareness about disability and digital accessibility among the City Hall's teams. When not directly confronted with disability or reading difficulties, it’s difficult to figure out all the issues and their complexity. Our project with U31 prompted us to imagine ourselves in the shoes of people with reading and digital disabilities. We became aware of the importance of making websites accessible to all users. It’s probably going to change the way we write all our content and create all our designs now. Plus, we presented the initiative to our general direction in September 2020 and to the Mayor and the demonstration of U31 convinced them to launch the first stage of the project. There was also another benefit to that project: being in a OSR move, it allowed the different municipal departments of the City Hall to get to know each other better and to work together, and to share their different approaches.

Morgane Hauguel: The project is ongoing, so we don't have any feedback from users yet, but we should get some soon. To measure the effectiveness of our tool, we can conduct eye-tracking tests to analyze the eye activity of users and see if their reading comfort is improved. We can also analyze the abandonment rates and the time spent on each step of the navigation. For the city of Saint-Chamond, we will mainly conduct qualitative surveys with their public.

Morgane Hauguel: The first constraints were technical. We had to make sure the tool could be compatible with Saint-Chamond website and their internal publication processes. When you start with an existing website, there are processes that are already in place and people who manage the it in certain ways. Sometimes the website is even managed by external service providers. Launching an experimental project in these conditions can sometimes feel a little overwhelming. Our job is to facilitate the processes for the customer: at first we conduct tests on simple things, like 3 ou 4 pages, before going into more complex projects.

Saint-Chamond City Hall: Indeed, we could feel the constraints mentioned by Morgane, but the first constraint was to convince the decision-making bodies of the interest of such a tool, to launch an experimental project, with no experience and no reference.

Saint-Chamond City Hall: The most important is to be aware, or to make ourselves and our collaborators aware of the issues of disability and digital accessibility. This is an essential point in such an approach, because it allows you to understand the all the issues, but also to have strong arguments to convince people around you. Moreover, we think it is important to test the tools with your audience to see how they react and what can be improved.

Morgane Hauguel: The advice I could give is to go step by step, little by little, starting with simple things like adapting one or two web pages, and then see how you can go further afterwards.

The next step is the adaptation of the whole website.

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