Developing an accessible web site

1
Developing an accessible web site

• Where we are
• and
• How we got there

2
Key messages

• Accessibility
• Is about more than disability
• Doesnt happen by accident
• Involves choices
• Can consume you
• Needs to be customer focused
• You need really top HTML skills
• You need a champion and team buy in

3
How we went about it

• Initial corporate imperatives
• What this meant for the project
• Technical design
• Implementation
• Learnt from our mistakes

4
Corporate imperatives

• Consistent corporate branding
• Make information more accessible
• Improved look and feel
• Retain content management

5
What this meant for us

• What are we delivering?
• To whom are we delivering it?
• What technology constraints are there?
• Draft web guidelines
• Portal/metadata issues

6
What we found about accessibility

• Priority 1 is moderately easy
• but its not enough
• Complete Priority 2 is hard but you can go a long
  way
• You need some Priority 3

7
You need to go beyond priority 1
To go from this
8
You need to go beyond priority 1
To this
9
You need to go beyond priority 1 .
Or to go to this
10
Where weve ended up

• We meet Priority 1
• Weve gone a long way towards Priority 2 and 3
• Were not at HTML 4.01 Transitional (for now)
• But the site meets our objectives!
• And we continue to improve on it

11
Other points

• Dont forget about PDFs (5.0)
• Think accessibility in all your design decisions
• Constant vigilance is needed
• Its not just a technical challenge

12
Example for Checkpoint13.1 Clearly identify
the target for each
Priority 2
Link text should be meaningful enough to make
sense when read out of context -- either on its
own or as part of a sequence of links. Link text
should also be terse. The following list shows
three possible ways of choosing link text from a
sentence 1. Win a prize donated by one of our
thousands of sponsors.           The link
phrase, "win a prize", is terse, meaningful out
of context and likely to grab your attention if
seen by itself. 2. Win a prize donated by one of
our thousands of sponsors.           Selecting
the entire sentence as the link is unnecessary,
and long links can wrap on the screen, which may
confuse some users. 3. Click here to win a prize
donated

13
Compromises and lessons

• Sacrificed full priority 2/3 for other benefits
  of Notes
• Modified overall design for access key info
• Only made limited attempts at browser
  compatibility
• Hard to get meaningful value for accesskey
• Missing browser standards

14
Heres one boo boo!
Before
After