The Treasury
New Zealand Disability Strategy Implementation Work Plan. 1 July 2005 – 30 June 2006
1. Business as usual initiatives
The Treasury has disability specific initiatives that are now seen as business as usual and are now imbedded into our organisational infrastructure. These include:
- Providing workplace support through the provision of any equipment required by a disabled person in order to do their job.
- Assisting the Office of Disability Issues on financial assessment and advice in relation to their policy work.
- All new or redeveloped web sites established by the Treasury comply with the State Services Commission Web Guidelines.
2. Improve Awareness and Understanding
Desired Outcome
Disability issues will be considered in all primary policy advice by The Treasury.
Description
Treasury will consider disability issues in primary policy advice. Equipping policy analysts with an understanding of disability issues, Disability Perspective Framework and the New Zealand Disability Strategy will help raise awareness of disability issues and the impacts of these issues on disabled people when producing policy advice.
Measures and Timeframes
The Treasury will provide presentations for policy analysts on consideration of disability issues in policy advice. This could include where The Treasury has undertaken policy advice that considered significant disability issues.
The Office of Disability Issues publication “Disability Perspective Framework” will be made available for Policy Analysts to become familiar with.
Links to Strategy Objective and Action
Encourage and educate for a non-disabling society.
Foster an aware and responsive public service – actions 6.2, 6.4
3. Ensure relevant information is available – externally and internally
Desired Outcome
As much information as possible will be in accessible formats on Treasury websites. Any new or redeveloped web sites established by the Treasury comply with the State Services Commission (SSC) Web Guidelines.
Description
The Treasury websites are undergoing a major review to be completed January 2006.
Review of the Treasury Websites
The Treasury began a review of its websites (Treasury, NZ DMO and Export Credit Office), in October 2004. This encompasses a number of areas relating to the content, design and management of the Treasury’s external websites. Improvements to the accessibility of the website are a major focus of the review.
During the review, the Treasury will:
- Evaluate accessibility best practice amongst other public sector websites in order to leverage work already done and lessons learnt by other departments.
- Download software used by disabled people in order to assess the usability of the current site and new designs for template pages:
- JAWS Screen reader – downloadable demo is available;
- Lynx – free text-only web browser for blind people;
- Links – free text-only browser used by people with low bandwidth;
- Opera, accessibility related features – free version available.
- Consider ways to promote the use of NZSL and ensure information and services are accessible to Deaf people. This will be conducted with assistance from a professional testing organisation.
Outcome Measures and Timeframes
- Prepare costs and a contract for disability website testers to test The Treasury’s website by September 2005
- Identify potential disability testers by October 2005
- Contract disability website testers by October 2005
- Website test results received by November 2005
- Treasury websites’ templates for HTML pages will be fully compliant with the Web Guidelines and their requirements with respect to accessibility – January 2006
- Processes for producing text (HTML) versions of all documents posted on the website will be streamlined. This will enable us to reduce our reliance on PDFs (which are largely inaccessible)
- Placing accessible documents on the web site and creating parallel text-only navigation of the Treasury web site by January 2005.
- An updated information page on both the Intranet and Internet with information about the services available to disabled staff and visitors (e.g. disabled car parks) and how to access them will be maintained and relevant information added as it becomes available by January 2006.
- Plans to action any recommendations for further improvements to The Treasury’s website completed by January/February 2006
Links to Strategy Objective and Action
Foster an aware and responsive public service – action 6.5.