Gemert-Bakel Municipality Gains Clarity on Accessibility Issues and How to Solve Them With Monsido

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Rob van der Broek serves as the webmaster/functional manager for Gemert-Bakel Municipality. The municipality's website plays a vital role in providing residents with relevant and up-to-date information, such as procedures for renewing driving licenses or passports.

The website also offers a wide range of services to residents, including requesting garbage drop-offs and filing complaints conveniently from their homes. As an online city hall, the website's primary objective is to ensure easy and efficient access to information, forms, and online services for all.

Problem:

Rob and his colleagues faced various challenges while managing the workload associated with serving an entire online community. They recognized the importance of achieving excellence on their website, not just to reduce the time spent on answering inquiries via phone and email, but also to improve overall efficiency. They had to address several key issues in order to achieve their goals.

Firstly, they wanted to ensure inclusivity by providing understandable information for all residents and prioritizing web accessibility compliance. They also had to tackle the frustration experienced by residents when they encountered broken links that led to the wrong information. Additionally, uploading oversized images caused those images to appear broken on the website, which needed to be resolved. Lastly, they faced the challenge of making all documents accessible, as many content writers were unaware of the accessibility requirements.

Solution:

To overcome these challenges and enhance website accessibility and inclusivity, the Gemert-Bakel Municipality implemented several solutions. They leveraged Monsido’s Web Accessibility module and readability feature of the Quality Assurance module to improve website accessibility and ensure equal access to public information. They used Monsido’s Policy module to establish a rule to detect and notify them of the upload of oversized images, ensuring optimal display. The Heartbeat module helped them proactively identify and resolve any website downtime issues. The use of the Monsido Browser Extension facilitated the identification of broken links and misspellings, streamlining collaboration among content writers. They also utilized Monsido’s Accessibility module to maintain control over PDF accessibility of all documents and ensure accessibility for residents.

Why Monsido?

Before Monsido, Gemert-Bakel municipality was quite simply unaware of the state of their website’s accessibility. Monsido offered an invaluable tool that would allow Rob and his team to address various challenges and provide significant benefits for their website’s overall maintenance. First and foremost, it promised to provide a comprehensive overview of their website's health and Monsido’s Browser Extension enabled the identification and resolution of issues directly within the municipalities content management system (CMS). The tool would also be particularly useful during accessibility audits, as it would allow them to document their progress and track efforts made to improve website accessibility properly for the first time.

Moreover, Monsido's relative affordability made it an instantly attractive solution, this aspect being an understandably crucial factor for a public organization with tight budgetary constraints.

Key Challenges That Monsido Solved for the Municipality:

By implementing Monsido the municipality was able to overcome a number of key challenges. The tool played a crucial role in enhancing website accessibility by allowing Rob and his team to ensure that all residents could access information and services without encountering barriers. Monsido's comprehensive suite of modules also helped the municipality maintain high-quality content throughout the website by allowing them to easily and quickly identify and resolve web health issues. Furthermore, Monsido’s PDF accessibility solutions have proved instrumental in identifying several remediation issues that had previously plagued the municipality’s catalogue of documents and reports.

In addition to the above, Rob and his team found that Monsido’s industry leading platform provided valuable insights into the popularity of their different web pages, thus enabling the development of more targeted content catering specifically to areas and subjects that most peak resident interest. This continuous and ongoing assessment of visitor trends and creation of content that is more responsive and tailored to meet resident’s interests and needs has boosted the website’s user experience immeasurably, as well as the reputation of the municipality itself.

The Monsido Browser Extension has had the effect of significantly streamlining the municipalities workflow by allowing Rob and his team to promptly identify and resolve web health issues directly within their CMS (something they could not do using their previous solutions), saving them much valuable time and effort.

The Gemert-Bakel Municipality ultimately chose Monsido as its preferred solution due to the following three core factors:

Factor #1 - Monsido’s comprehensive overview of website health
Factor #2- Monsido’s affordability
Factor #3 Monsido’s user-friendly interface

By regularly utilizing Monsido, Rob and his colleagues have been able to achieve a much greater understanding of their website's accessibility compliance, effortlessly maintain flawless content, and continue to make improvements to the overall user experience. Monsido's suite of modules has proven to be a truly invaluable resource, empowering Gemert-Bakel's digital team to efficiently manage all their website-related activities and ensure equal access to public information for all residents.