Accessible website of Roth District Council

"What convinced us was the experience of portamundi with local government internet, intranet and e-government projects as well as the proven quality of the Content Management solution contentXXL. In addition to that, content XXL provides numerous functions to enhance the accessibility of the contents of the website."
 
Matthias Kelsch, member of the “internet” project team, Roth District Council

The Client

The district of Roth forms the southeastern part of the administrative area of central Franconia and includes 16 towns, market towns and communities with a total of 125,823 inhabitants. The District Council is a two-tier authority. It is partly a district authority and partly a state authority. The district council’s scope of activity is to use its powers to provide the appropriate public institutions which are necessary for the economic, social and cultural well being of the inhabitants of the district. The offices of the district council promote the economy and tourism and pursue social, cultural and organisational tasks.

The Task

• Relaunch of the website of Roth District Council, with the areas of life and work, leisure and tourism, district council online.
• Provide an attractive operating model for the communities contained within the district, offering the possibility of common use of functionalities, design templates and/or contents.
• Compliance with the IT Accessibility Directive (BITV)
• Authority signposting, standardisation of administrative structures and tasks
• Integration of an existing regional tourist directory
• Increase in quality of service for citizens, combined with positive cost effects for the district council
• Certainty of cost due to own management of creation and operation of the websites
• Target group: primarily citizens, but also economy and tourism

The solution with contentXXL

• contentXXL Basic System together with the Premium Modules documents, surveys, picture gallery
• Themed concept with colour codes for the content areas of life and work, leisure and tourism, district council online
• Full text search for all contents, including within such documents as PDF
• Events index with selections made via calendar function, search function, choice of theme
• Dynamic allocation of related content such as e.g. contacts, links or downloads via Content Relationship Management system
• Language variations German/English (in preparation)
• Accessibility in line with IT Accessibility Directive (BITV)
• Authority signposting with keywords, lifestyle, index of council departments
• Provision of selected content via RSS Newsfeeds
• Interface to an existing tourist directory, import of hotels, guest houses etc. via XML Webservices, display with adapted design templates, integration in the full text search 
• Development and implementation of legal profile concept for the standardisation of workflows 
• Server housing by e-government computer centre, service and support by portamundi
• Successful Certification by the Bavarian State Office for Statistics and Data Processing /RZ-Süd “Bayern-CERT“ certification after tests based on the IT security guideline “Regulations for the Implementation of penetration tests”

The Benefit

With the help of the Business Content Management System contentXXL, which is 100% based on the innovative and high performance technology Microsoft .NET, as well as the many years’ experience of the portamundi team with local government online presences, an attractive accessible website was developed, which also withstood a practical test with flying colours. Even before the system went live, the website was tested for accessibility by senior civil servant Willi Härlein and Elfriede Meyer, both blind employees of the district council. The verdict was that it was easy to use and understand.

Fig.: Accessible internet with contentXXL: the blind senior civil servant Willi Härlein surfs with a Braille reading device on the pages of Roth District Council.