Advice needed: Disrespectful situation
Dear A11Y community, would appreciate some advice. I am hired as the Content Lead for a public sector department. The department has various websites for the same purpose (none are accessibility-compliant, some worse than others).
Those websites were funded by public money but closely gated by whoever started the project, and are seen as ’their achievement’. Our organisational environment isn’t digitally mature, anything remotely digital gets praised a lot and seen as incredible regardless of practical usability.
I advise the department on comms and occasionally make content for service projects.
Recently I helped some projects, an overhaul of content to make them accessible. A lot of work and efforts went into those, including remake of the content plus alt formats transcript captions and descriptions.
The host destination, one of those closely gate-kept websites, has one of the poorest usability, and a web manager who claims it is the best and accessible (it isn’t… even on homepage it has those seizure-inducing rapid movements of texts)
It has repeatedly received feedback that people don’t want to use it, and it breaks a lot of the WCAG criteria. But the sole web manager refused feedback and defended the website (and demanded more money ‘to realise its full potential’)
It is up to the directors what they want to do with that website. Anyway, I formatted the content and sent a package that is as okay as it could be.
The web manager straight ignored me, went direct to my client requestor (who asked me to make the content), liaised with them that they can make any future content for them (I am not sure they’re qualified to do that?), and demanded me to send the initial file to them so they can put on their channel. All the while no acknowledgement (not replying to me but just ‘mention‘ me in their email to my client when demanded me to send stuff), no please, and no thanks.
To be fair I think there is more than accessibility issues with their website, and somehow we share the same line manager. How do I approach this diplomatically? It dreads me that I still support several projects while knowing hosting on their site is just very poorly for our users. Thank you.