Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
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377. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection her plans to make applications for social welfare supports available online at MyWelfare.ie in a way that is friendly to those who are blind or vision impaired; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [55545/21]

Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)
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The Department of Social Protection is committed to making the information on all its online portals accessible to all, regardless of ability. In order to achieve this, we have designed our portals to follow guidelines set out by the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium). The W3C WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) produces accessibility guidelines that are an internationally recognised benchmark of accessibility.

The Department is committed to inclusive design, enabling online portals, which can be used by all users including those who may have cognitive or physical impairments, such as blindness. This means that our sites, including MyWelfare.ie, can be used with assistive technologies such as screen readers or by using a keyboard for navigation, but also that the design of our sites supports cognitive and visual impairments such as dyslexia, colour blindness or those short of sight, to ensure for all users that there is a smooth journey and experience through our online portals.

In designing new services for MyWelfare.ie the Department continues to engage with customers and stakeholder groups to assist in the design and testing of prototypes to help shape online services in a customer centric manner.

The Department is also aware of the new requirement for Public Body websites to meet the new WCAG 2.1 standard. Following the completion of audits of our sites, the websites’ accessibility statements will include a statement of commitment and a compliance status statement as required under the European Union (Accessibility of Websites and Mobile Applications of Public Sector Bodies) Regulations 2020.