What is a Website Accessibility Rating? How Content Portals Improve Accessibility

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ If your customers were to rate their most recent experience using your website, would they give it 5 stars?

One of the biggest contributors to creating an outstanding customer web experience that most organizations don’t think about often is accessibility.

But it makes sense. If your website is accessible, it means that everyone can access the services and information they need on your website, including the 1 in 4 people in the U.S. who have a disability. And beyond simply being able to access what they need, your users are more likely to have a positive experience on your website if it has a high accessibility rating. Accessibility even serves as a core component of a strong AI strategy with its ability to lay the groundwork for future AI innovation.

In other words, it’s a significant customer experience and AI readiness upgrade, so attaining a high accessibility ranking should be every organization’s goal.

Let’s take a closer look at what goes into an accessibility rating for different industries and how one organization recently skyrocketed from 1,385^th to 1^st place in the Silktide Index for US local government counties.

How Content Portals Improve Website Accessibility

What is a Website Accessibility Rating?

Accessibility ratings come from the previously mentioned Silktide Index, which evaluates the web accessibility of worldwide organizations across industries and assigns them a score based on how well they comply with the globally recognized standard for web accessibility, WCAG.

Given how impactful a high accessibility rating can be on your customer experience, it’s worth prioritizing no matter what industry you’re in. But if you’re a government-based organization, it’s even more important. Web accessibility is now a legal requirement for all public sector organizations in the US, pushing these organizations to deliver highly accessible digital experiences that comply with WCAG 2.2 AA standards.

How Content Portals Improve Accessibility

The top answer to website accessibility in the age of intelligent automation: Content Portals like the Hyland Content Portal. This technology is known for its user-friendly pre-developed themes and integrated approach which make it easy to rapidly deploy robust, accessible websites, and the Hyland Content Portal is especially designed to take it a step further by seamlessly connecting to OnBase solutions.

Let’s return to that organization we mentioned earlier that raised its website accessibility rating from 1,385^th to 1^st place: Utah-based Wasatch County Government. Their strategy: Working with Hyland and Jadu to create a digital layer to bridge citizen services with core government operations with the Hyland Content Portal powered by Jadu.

Wasatch County decided to turn to the Hyland Content Portal partially because they were a longtime OnBase user. Implementing this specific solution allowed them to integrate with their OnBase solution and WorkView to create a new website that’s accessible and highly personalized to citizens and that’s seamlessly connected to their systems.

The result of this integrated approach (beyond that incredible leap in accessibility ranking, of course) is that Wasatch County can now deliver seamless, personalized experiences to citizens while simultaneously maintaining the highest standards of security and accessibility. And more broadly, this initiative has supported the County’s digital transformation strategy by successfully integrating its back-office operations and citizen-facing services.

“We wanted to deliver a digital layer for the communities in Wasatch County that connected our citizens with their data. More than that, we wanted to create a platform that enabled integration and automation with the back office and create digital services that are accessible.” -Don Wood, CIO of Wasatch County Government

You can even learn more about Wasatch County Government’s content portal strategy and this exciting achievement here. You can also hear directly from Don Wood, Wasatch County Government’s CIO in this video from JADU.

Want to get a closer idea of how content portals can improve your accessibility? Drop a comment or question in the chat, we’d love to hear from you.

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