Time to reflect two years on

This week has been a busy week of presentations that has inspired me to start blogging, it’s really made me appreciate our SCULPT for Accessibility journey is unique.

To end this week I’ve presented the journey of SCULPT at Worcestershire County Council, from the early humble beginnings as a PDF in 2019, to present day being recognised and mentioned on websites nationally. This week I also presented with a colleague as finalists in two categories of the MJ Awards, we have come such a long way, yet still have so much to do. The beginnings of our journey can be read on AbilityNet: Everyone can SCULPT for Accessibility.

I finished the week thinking we really are at the cusp of making a difference. The team I work for discussed the vast opportunities we have for SCULPT, how we could move it forward in the organisation and how we support the wider skills gap in the community for building inclusive materials. It’s an exciting time. 

This week we also had challenges though. My colleagues had to address some awful documents at the last minute for a tight deadline, there were a significant number of pages, but so poor for accessibility they pretty much needed to be made again, it took several people several hours to fix, reformat and rebuild them.

Frustratingly using some simple principles when the document was created in Microsoft Word this extra work and panic could’ve been completely prevented. Had the basic SCULPT skills been applied when these documents were created it would’ve likely only taken about 20 minutes to prepare the documents for the web. 

It was a third party who had made them, they had never heard about document accessibility before. This got us thinking how much potential the SCULPT skills have out in the world, and how much more time efficient and inclusive these processes could be if the SCULPT principles were the norm.

Although a frustrating hiccup it’s identified a fantastic opportunity to spread awareness and the skills to make inclusive documents wider into our third party partners. 

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