Web Access Centre

NHS Scotland web accessibility case study - Web Access Centre

Summary: Find out how Civic Computing, a web design agency, made the NHS Scotland website accessible.

• Introduction to the project
  
• Project start-up
• The immediate issues
• Our experience
• Quality checking procedures
• Outcomes
• Case studies

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Introduction to the project

This case study describes the experience of Civic Computing, a Web Communications and Design company, working with the RNIB and Civic’s client, NHS Quality Improvement Scotland, to create a website that attains the ‘See it Right’ accreditation. The site can be found at http://www.nhshealthquality.org.

For the past eighteen months, Civic has been working to improve the accessibility of our clients’ websites. Each website has presented new challenges and has encouraged us to develop techniques that have raised the level of Accessibility of each successive website from an initial WAI ‘A’ up to WAI ‘AAA’ for the most recent.

When NHS Quality Improvement Scotland commissioned Civic to create a website meeting the RNIB’s ‘See It Right’ accreditation, it gave us the opportunity to apply the experience we had gained.

Project start-up

We started the project with a number of advantages:

1. Our Client clearly was clearly committed to providing universal accessibility on its website.
NHS Quality Improvement Scotland set aside the necessary budget for the RNIB Audit, and the resources required to achieve the RNIB standard of accessibility by the time of launch and to maintain it thereafter

2. The support of RNIB.

We recognised the importance of involving RNIB from the initial stages of the website development. This approach proved very effective and meant that during the audit stage amendments and reworking were minimal.

3. The existing good working relationship between Civic’s staff and the staff of the RNIB Scotland.

4. Using the Civic Content Control (Civic’s content management system) to build the website, our web designers and software developers were able to implement easily maintained accessibility features.


5. The experience of our Web Design and Software Development teams, gained over the past eighteen month in addressing accessibility issues.


The experience needed to build a “See It Right” website is not achieved overnight and we had already met most of the issues.

6. Our project management approach.

Having already managed previous projects delivering Accessible websites enabled us to estimate, plan, resource and deliver a fully tested website with RNIB accreditation achieved on time.

The immediate issues

There were two new main Accessibility issues for us:

1. In addition to the technical issues of accessibility, the new website had to meet the additional accessibility requirements for the “See It Right” Audit in regard to subtler matters related to writing style, navigation, “listenability”, etc. The RNIB’s advice on these issues was very useful.

2. NHS Quality Improvement Scotland is an organisation formed by the amalgamation of five others, each with their own website. The content of these websites had to be migrated to the new accessible one. This content included several hundred PDF and Word documents that had been created before accessibility was an issue.

3. The agreed solution to this issue was that Civic and NHS Quality Improvement Scotland would ensure that all new documents were accessible and that NHS Quality Improvement Scotland would provide the resources and implement processes for a rolling conversion of the legacy documents.

Our experience

With the involvement of the RNIB from the outset of the process we were able to resolve issues as they arose.

For example, we intended to use ALT=”*” for ‘eye candy’ images as in the past, but the RNIB had recently changed to recommending the use of null quotes instead. On listening to the result we wholeheartedly agree!

We had also planned to extend the use of the TITLE tag, but again advice from the RNIB on how screen readers currently handle TITLE tags enabled us to take a different approach to their use.

Apart from such technical matters, we also extended our in-house skills in Adobe Acrobat, Word 2000 and JAWS so that we could provide advice to NHS Quality Improvement Scotland on what was required technically and the processes required to create new, and convert from old, PDF and word documents.

Quality checking procedures

We use ‘Watchfire Bobby’ software to monitor accessibility while the site is being built, we check the validity of the HTML and CSS with the WC3 and WDG validators, browse the website using various graphical browsers and Lynx, and listen to how the site sounds with Freedom Scientific’s Jaws.

Finally, we review the website using our own comprehensive internal QA ‘checklist’. This checklist covers all WAI, RNIB and e-Envoy accessibility and usability guidelines and best practises.

Through this process, the NHS QIS (Quality Improvement Scotland) site attained the WAI ‘AAA’ level of Accessibility – though this is not a requirement for the “See It Right” accreditation nor a guarantee of it.

Outcomes

The experience of developing a website with the ‘See It Right’ accreditation has been a very positive one for us. We have learned more, added new techniques and tips to our accessibility armoury, and have the experience of planning for an RNIB audit to draw upon in future. Also, as we have found with each new website, improving accessibility means better usability for all visitors to the website.

Most of all, we have the satisfaction of knowing we have the experience and skills to help our Clients realise their commitment to creating an accessible websites.

Has it been worth it? Our answer is a resounding yes.

In our view the importance of the RNIB’s ‘See It Right’ campaign is that other well known accessibility logos are often misused, whereas the ‘See It Right’ logo guarantees that a website is truly accessible in that

• it fulfils all the technical requirements
• the HTML or XHTML markup is valid
• essential issues other than technical have been addressed, for example, navigation, writing style, page layouts, consistency, etc.
• accessibility has been established within the last year
• the client has put in place processes to maintain accessibility

With this independent confirmation of a high level of accessibility shown by the ‘See It Right’ logo on the website, Civic and NHS QIS shows a site visitor their commitment to universal access on the web.

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Content author: webaccess@rnib.org.uk

Last updated: 06/03/2008 15:41