SCULPT makes final of Tech4Good Awards

The model was shortlisted in the Workplace Inclusion Award, at a virtual award ceremony on 14 July.

It has been created to help people create inclusive documents that can be read by everyone, including those who use assistive technology.

The SCULPT model and supporting graphics, were created by Helen Wilson, a Digital Designer in the council’s web team.

Public body websites now have to adhere to the legal web accessibility guidelines, and the web team at the council are responsible for the digital accessibility compliance of the council’s websites and intranets.

SCULPT was developed to support these guidelines, and to help county council staff ensure documents they had created were accessible, before they were sent to residents or uploaded to the County Council website.

SCULPT is an acronym, which breaks down into easy to follow principles that can help make a document meet basic accessibility requirements.

The six principles are:

• structure of a document (using headings and styles)
• colour and contrast
• use of images
• links
• plain English
• table structure (avoid split or merged cells)

Helen Wilson, Digital Designer at Worcestershire County Council said: “Worcestershire County Council have been extremely supportive of SCULPT, and the team I work for fully embraced and championed my SCULPT idea from the beginning. I came up with the idea one evening scribbling on a notepad after a frustrating meeting I’d had earlier in the day with a colleague who used assistive technology. Making documents accessible for use on a screen reader can actually be really simple, and would avoid so many unnecessary frustrations if people knew how to do it.



“I truly believe it’s the responsibility of everyone to be digitally inclusive, not just the web or IT team, so SCULPT underpins accessibility awareness as well as those very basic skills that means everyone can use SCULPT to shape their documents for inclusivity.”



Councillor Adam Kent, Cabinet Member for Corporate Service and Communication said: “We firmly believe digital equality and inclusion in the workplace is the responsibility of everyone. SCULPT has been a real success story and has deservedly had lots of interest from other authorities and workplaces, wanting to integrate it into their own training and working practices, and it’s great that Worcestershire County Council have been able to lead the way on this. Helen has been really proud to share the model with others, whether that be on podcasts, or speaking on government blogs and talks. It’s great to see SCULPT recognised for this award.”

SCULPT has now become a mandatory learning module for all new starters and existing staff at Worcestershire County Council.



Helen is currently working with Heart of Worcestershire college to develop the SCULPT resources further, so that the model can be shared and support people more widely with our resources and practice.



The college are also looking to adopt it as staff training and help us lead the way with SCULPT in education, because every teacher now has to make sure their resources are accessible before uploading them online for their students.