Web Access Centre

Planning for accessibility

Summary: A truly accessible website comes from careful planning and assessment of resources, available technologies and objectives.

• Determine your target level of compliance
• Know your market and target audience
• Budgets and timelines
• Training and awareness
• Document the design and build of the new site
• Redesigning sites
• Implementing accessibility links

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As with the design and build of any new site or re-design of an existing one, clearly defined goals need to be established, agreed and understood. Accessibility goals such as the level of compliance, responsibilities, checkpoints and timelines need to be documented and integrated with the rest of the design and build process. This will ensure the process of building an accessible site is smooth and efficient.

Determine your target level of compliance

Determining your level of compliance broadly comes down to consideration of a number of factors such as your market, target audience, resources available, budget and timelines.

Once assessed you can then decide what level of compliance you wish to aim for. Typically this is done with reference to the Website Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines. Levels of compliance range from “A”, “AA” or “AAA”.

• Priority 1 “A”. The most basic standard. A site must comply with all of the priority one checkpoints to achieve this standard.
• Priority 2 “AA”. A higher standard than the single “A”. Sites must comply with all of the priority one and two checkpoints to achieve this standard.
• Priority 3 “AAA”. A high standard of accessibility. Sites must comply with all priority one, two and three checkpoints to achieve this standard.

Know your market and target audience

An initial task is to assess your position in your market. Peer group analysis can be carried out to identify strengths and weaknesses of sites similar to yours. This should give you valuable information regarding the kind of accessibility standards that other organisations are following, which areas of accessibility are simple to achieve and which areas will take more time.

This needs to be carried out together with analysis of your target audience. It is important to gain a clear understanding of the people who use your site, specifically the needs of those with disabilities. Designing for multiple groups of people with different needs may influence the level of compliance with the WAI you aim to achieve.

Budgets and timelines

Working within your budget and timelines may mean that not everything is possible immediately. There may be a need to prioritise accessibility requirements once they have been defined and group them into stages. Key areas to consider when prioritising include:

• Accessibility issues that have a negative impact on the people who use your site.
• Accessibility issues that can be easily addressed and instantly have a high impact on the accessibility of a site.
• Accessibility issues that are more complex but necessary.

The section in the site on basic and advanced techniques of accessibility provides information on the ease of various issues to fix.

Training and awareness

It may also be necessary to develop training material, presentations or awareness sessions for the people who manage, design, develop or author your website.

The level of support and willingness of the people involved to adopt new ways of doing things can be critical to success. If you have researched, planned and built an accessible website, your efforts can still be undermined and will eroded if your team do not change to have the "accessibility habit" and support the new processes you have created.

Document the design and build of the new site

Once you have defined what areas are to be addressed first and how they are to be implemented in the design and build process, everything should be documented. Typically this document will evolve into an ongoing plan for testing your site as well as a guide for post launch maintenance and updates. This document should be integrated with all the design and build documentation and treated as part of the process rather than an area bolted on at the end of the project.

Redesigning sites

The process of taking an existing website and "retro-fitting" it for accessibility is slightly different from planning a new build site. First of all, it is likely that the site will have a number of inherited issues, especially if it is existed for a long time, and even more so if it has had a large number of people working on it.

When redesigning an existing site, evaluation of the site will come first. It should be assessed for existing levels of accessibility and feedback sought from users. This can then be fed into the planning process.

Implementing accessibility links

• Planning
• Content Management Systems
• Intranets
• Checklists
• Testing
• Evaluation and monitoring
• Return to implementing accessibility

For Web Access Centre updates email webaccess@rnib.org.uk

Content author: webaccess@rnib.org.uk

Last updated: 06/03/2008 15:41