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The first step in creating your accessible website is to make a careful and honest assessment of your resources, available technologies and objectives. Goals that are defined, agreed and understood right from the start by everyone involved in the project have much greater chance of success.
The level of support and willingness of the people involved to adopt new ways of doing things is critical to success. If you have researched, planned and built an accessible website, the only way to make sure your efforts aren't undermined and eroded is to be confident that your whole team buys into the "accessibility habit" and supports the new processes you have put in place.
Accessibility goals such as conformance level, timelines, responsibilities and testing mechanisms need to be an integral part of the design and build process, so that accessibility is an important consideration right through the project.
Decide on your conformance level
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines* offer three levels of conformance. To choose which conformance level is right for your site, you'll need to understand a number of factors such as your competitors, target audience, resources, budget and timelines.
Research your competitors and target audience
It's worth reading the accessibility statements* on sites similar to yours to find out what (if any) conformance level they aim to achieve. Knowing which accessibility standards similar organisations are following will help you to decide what level to aim for.
Most organisations aim for double-A conformance, unless they're targeting user groups with particular disabilities, in which case including the triple-A criteria affecting those disabilities may be the way to go. For example, if your main target audience is users with hearing problems, then you may choose to include the triple-A criteria around video captioning and sign language.
Once you've chosen a conformance level, create a checklist (Excel, 144KB) that'll provide clear guidance to developers, designers and content producers.
We'd recommend you have us carry out a Surf Right and WCAG2 audit, which enables you to display an RNIB accreditation logo and a WCAG2 conformance statement once any issues we've flagged up have been fixed. We can work with you throughout the project lifecycle to ensure that everything from your wireframes to the finished product is accessible.
Intranet accessibility
You need to use a slightly different approach when building intranets and Content Management Systems (CMS). Ensuring your intranet is accessible is as much a legal requirement as for your public facing websites, but some of the accessibility issues are different. As well as outputting accessible content, A CMS needs to be accessible for its authors and publishers who'll be adding content.
On the plus side, however, you're likely to know a lot more about the technologies (browsers, access technologies* etc) that people inside your organisation are using and be able to build your website to work with those particular technologies.
Examine your building blocks
Your approach to accessibility will depend on whether there are any constraints on the suite of technologies you'll use to build the site.
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If you're writing the code from the ground up then creating accessible, standards-compliant code won't be too much of an issue.
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If you're planning to use a web creation tool or CMS but haven't chosen one yet, you'll save a lot of development time by doing some research to find one that both fits your business need and generates accessible mark-up.
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If you're tied to a particular tool or CMS, it's worth taking time to research any accessibility issues discovered by other developers or organisations and how they resolved them.
Budgets and timelines
Working within your budget and timelines may mean that you can't do everything at once. You might need to prioritise accessibility requirements and group them into stages. Your priorities might look something like this:
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"Win-win" issues that can be easily fixed and instantly have a high positive impact on your site's accessibility.
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Issues that aren't too difficult to fix but have a lower impact.
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Issues that, although still necessary, are more complex and may take a little longer.
On the Build page later in this walkthrough, you'll find basic and more complex examples of issues you might come across, as well as recommendations to help you fix them.
Training and awareness
You'll likely need to develop training material, presentations and/or awareness sessions for the people who manage, design, develop and author your website, to be delivered at key stages throughout the project. For example, your designers may need training on the importance of clear fonts, good colour contrast and flexible layouts before the design phase begins, and your developers might benefit from a web accessibility training course or having regular accessibility research time added to their calendars.
Document your accessibility work
Once you've identified and prioritised what needs to be done to make your site accessible, the decisions you've made should be documented. This document usually evolves into an ongoing plan for testing your site as well as a reference for post-launch fixes, maintenance and updates. This document should be an integral part of the design and build documentation and treated as part of the process rather than a discrete element.
Redesigning sites
The process of taking an existing website and "retro-fitting" it for accessibility is slightly different from planning a new build site. The site is likely to have a number of inherited issues, especially if it has existed for a long time, and even more so if it has had a lot of people working on it.
The first step in redesigning an existing site is to evaluate how accessible it is currently, which should include getting feedback from your users. This usually leads to an iterative design, build and test process.
It would be a valuable exercise to have a benchmarking Conformance Overview performed to establish current levels of accessibility and flag up content or techniques that should be corrected.