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Accessible Web Design - PAGE 6
"God is in the details."
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe.
Production process
This page covers 3 basic kinds of production processes. They are:
- Designing a new accessible site
- Making an existing site accessible
- Creating content management systems
A web site that demonstrates effective processes for accessibility has undergone the following steps:
- Design concepting that has allowed for disabled users as part of the target audience
- Skilled coding and intelligent use of WCAG 1.0
- Thorough use of testing tools
- Real life testing with disabled users and/or accessibility experts
Some of the key management issues that need to be addressed are:
- Determine the conformance goal
- Understand what will work and what will not
- Educate management, design and content staff
- Ensure external developers comply to conformance level
- Establish quality assurance procedures
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Production strategies
Designing a new site
When you consider how many hundreds of years it has taken humanity to perfect documenting content in a written format, it's not surprising that the notion of 'web standards' is not yet mainstream.
For example, most government organizations are aware that an html document must conform to 'priority 1', but do they really know what it means? It's often considered as a superfluous extra that can be discarded if budgets are tight.
Some points to consider:
- incorporate accessible design into the concepting stage
- be flexible about how design objectives can be implemented
- design for standards, not for specific browsers or disabilities
- seek professional advice and perform testing with real users and purpose built tools
Making an existing site accessible
- set priorities for achieving accessibility
- start by redesigning the high traffic and entry pages of the site
- ensure that all new pages conform to the new priorities
- aim to redesign high-traffic pages to the highest accessibility priorities
- it is often best to redesign page templates that existing content can fit into
Content management systems (authoring tools)
It is just as important that people who are able to access information are also able to author it. Accessibility issues should be carefully considered in parallel to usability issues when creating content management systems.
Authoring tools refer to:
- WYSIWYG html and XML editors
- word processing and desktop publishing packages that allow you to save material in a web format
- tools that produce multimedia for the web (e.g. video and SMIL authoring packages)
- tools for site management, including sites that automatically generate web content from a database
- tools for managing layout (e.g. CSS formatting tools)
Content management systems should conform to the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. The three basic considerations of these guidelines are:
- tools should produce accessible content
- they should encourage users to author accessible work (e.g. using prompts, options and help)
- they should be accessible themselves
The W3C website contains techniques on creating accessible authoring tools.
For authoring tool reviews, see Authoring Tool Conformance Evaluations.
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