The City of Royal Oak turns to CivicPlus® to Make its Website Accessible to its Residents

The City of Royal Oak is committed to maintaining an inclusive website for every resident in their community. Monsido was the right match with an automated web accessibility scan that comes together with Accessibility Guidelines that allow Judy Davids, the City of Royal Oak’s Community Engagement Specialist, to fix accessibility issues herself.

Davids said she uses a screen reader when not wearing her glasses. She understands how vital web accessibility tools are for visually impaired residents and potentially for anyone with any minor visual deficits. This experience made her understand the importance of accessible information on the website.

Proactively Apply Accessibility Best Practice

“Monsido provides both tools and hands-on training that allowed me to understand how to tackle web accessibility with a concrete action plan and best practices in mind,” said Davids. “Providing a meaningful alt text is one of the most common issues that is easy to fix by our web content editors.”

Monsido allows Davids to learn more about web accessibility in small bites over time.

“Monsido inspired me to become an ambassador of web accessibility and promote best practices to my team of 12 colleagues,” she said. “Our website is maintained with small updates day to day, and bigger updates are made once a year. Having web accessibility best practices in mind when adding new content allows us to save time by identifying fewer web accessibility issues that we need to fix. I like getting reports. I like the fact that we can easily find where the problems are and how to fix them. I feel like I’m not like an expert on it yet, but every time I use it, I feel like I learn more. And yeah, I really like the product a lot.”

Improve Navigation and Engagement

When residents browse our website, they expect to find information and know which department they need to contact. Navigation might be a struggle, as nine out of 10 people would not know that the City Clerk issues dog licenses. Our website needs to be easy to navigate and we design the website with a focus on what residents need to know to apply for different licenses and permissions.

Monsido allows us to improve the structure of the website and make sure it is easy to navigate when residents are looking for information about a specific transaction with the local authorities in the City of Royal Oak.

Monsido allows the web team in the City of Royal Oak to apply new practices for web accessibility and web team collaboration in solving web issues. The web team has improved from fixing past mistakes to doing things the right way. When adding a new image, now they always add a meaningful alt text.

Thanks to the superior training with the CivicPlus customer success team, Davids can spread the best practices among her team and share the training recordings with them.

Monsido also allowed the web team to understand the user interaction and engagement on our website. They focus on maintaining a trustworthy website with updated and easy-to-find information for the residents in their community.