Waterford City Council Library Service: Recipients of Excellence through Accessibility award
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Video Transcript
Voiceover: Waterford City Council, Library Service Waterford City Council Library Service provides a wide variety of books, magazines, DVDs, music CDs and activities in three branches in Waterford City. ‘Access to All’ is one of the libraries’ key values. The Central Library at Lady Lane has been extensively upgraded to accommodate the needs of customers with disabilities.
Mary Conway, Senior Executive Librarian, Waterford City Council: If you can walk in or come into a building and you can get what you want very easily, it just creates a much more accessible service to everybody. Having audio books, large print and the accessible technology station, close to the front door, eliminates a lot of barriers for people. If people have to go straight through a building up the stairs, up in lifts even, it creates that extra barrier for them that is really unnecessary. The impact of working with the NDA and going through all of this process is that it has really embedded the whole idea of creating an accessible service, not only in the people who work is in the building but across the board, throughout the organisation. The staff have gained enormously from this, its part of their day to day working now, people think now about how can we make the service better, what can we do to take different things into account, its part of our learning now, it will go on through our whole organisational culture now.
Claire Hartley Administrative Officer, Community and Enterprise, Waterford City Council: There’s an ongoing commitment by the senior management team to continue to improve our services and to look at how we provide those services. City Council will be committed to ongoing training, some of the members I suppose of the access team are providing that training internally to our own staff based on the learning, I suppose, that we’ve taken from the Excellence through Accessibility process.
Lar Power Director of Service, Housing and Community and Enterprise, Waterford City Council: Well basically Waterford City Councils in the process of designing a new Civic Offices and we intend to work with the NDA to ensure that new Civic Office is accessible for all our customers bearing in mind like we cater for you know a population in excess of 50,000 people here in Waterford City and we want to ensure those services are accessible and by working with the NDA at the pre-planning and the planning stage we believe we can implement changes through our proposals for our new office accommodation to ensure that the product offering we have is appropriate for a service provider like we are.
Apply for the Excellence through Accessibility award
If you work in a public body and would like to work with the National Disability Authority to improve the accessibility of your services and built environment, you should apply to take part in the Excellence through Accessibility award process.
E-mail the Excellence through Accessibility team at eta@nda.ie or phone them at 01-6080 400. You can also apply through our online Excellence through Accessibility Award Application form.
Page last updated: 05/18/2009