Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Building an Acessible Site From the Ground Up

AccessibleWeb@U Meeting Notes, March 25, 2009

  • Building an Accessible Site From the Ground Up
    • Goal is to create a new Web site for the Development & Behavioral Pediatrics, currently at http://depts.washington.edu/dbpeds
    • Current site was developed by Dr. Samuel Zinner
      • The site built on SimpleSite, which is going away, prompting the need to build a new version.

    • Want an improved site
      • More usable
      • More visually pleasing
      • More compliant to ADA
      • Take into consideration people with cognitive disabilities
      • Sites Dr. Zinner likes


    • Development work on the site will be done by Yuka Tsukamaki and Preethi Dutta, graduate students of the U.W. Information School, as part of the Capstone program (http://www.ischool.washington.edu/msim/capstone/)
      • Working with Yuka and Preethi are Faye Louie (CHDD) and Seiya Urae (Medicine)

    • The current site has many links in the left column. Key features of the site are the following:
      • Clinics and Activities
      • Schedules
      • Advocacy Opportunities
      • Training Modules at other sites
      • Featured Articles
        • Commenting on how press has spun stories, linking to more valid articles

      • Resources for Community
      • Screening & Surveillance Tools
        • Want to teach physicians better earlier screening and identification
        • Some are copyrighted, protectd by password



  • Discussion
    • Find out how the current site is being used
      • Catalyst system gives you number of site visits but not page stats
      • People not necessarily going through home page
      • 2/3 of School of Public Health site visits do not go through home page

    • Could add Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) to the current site to collect data until the new site is built
      • Requires adding Javascript at the bottom of each page you want to collect visit data on.
      • Goal is to find out who actually is visiting the site and what they are looking at
      • Google Analytics not only gives page visit counts but also gives breakdowns of who is visiting
      • Who is your real audience at present? How does the current audience compare to the audience you want to reach?

    • Evaluate your content
      • What are the unique things people might look for on your site?
      • How good is your site technically. For example, are there dead links?

      • How well written, edited, and polished is your content
        • Is the style consistent throughout the content?
        • Is there consistent voice and role in the writing?


    • Define the purpose of site
      • Be clear about priorities and audiences
        • Work on a statement of Priorities and Audiences; put it in writing, pass it around
          • Clarify what parts of content are for the department and what parts are for outside audiences (audiences, therapists, parents)
            • Separating departmental/staff content from content for outside audiences might be a basic concept in your design

          • What types of user needs do you most want to support
          • Articulate priorities and rank them relative to each other



    • State any considerations
      • Do HIPAA health information privacy laws apply (http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/)?
      • Intellectual property ownership
        • Is any content on the site copyrighted? Do you have permission to distribute the content (you do not need permission to just link to things on other sites)

      • Privacy
        • Doctors' schedules; can they be public?
        • Doctors' contact information; can it be public?


    • Assess the resources available to maintain the site
      • How much manpower will be available to maintain the site once it exists?
        • About four people maintain the content of the current site. All four have lots of other things they are involved in.

      • What implications does the amount of manpower have on what you want to try to do in building the site?

    • Consider a Content Management System


  • Designing a Web site for people with special needs
    • Good accessible design resources at on the UW IT Accessibility site at
      http://www.washington.edu/accessibility/
    • Topics
      • Font size
        • Flexible web page designs (sizes and dimensions are set with relative measures such as percents and em-spaces) allow the user to adjust the font size to what is comfortable for them
        • Fixed font sizes, especially if the size is small, can be a big obstacle

      • Colors


    • Basic steps
      • Choose a version of html or xhtml and stick to it
        • We suggest XHTML
        • Write to the standard, not to a specific browser

      • Write compliant code; code that is correct according to the version of html/xhtml you are using. Validate your code frequently as you work on it.
      • Use semantic markup; XHTML has predefined logical element types such
        as paragraph, h1 headings, and ordered lists. Using these elements as they are intended to be used means each block of text has a declared logical type that can be help assistive software interpret the page and present it intelligibly to the user.
      • Use a simple page structure; pages are made up of a number of divisions such as header, left-column, content, right-column, and footer.
      • Separate content from presentation; put page content into semantic xhtml and control presentation on the page with CSS stylesheets

    • Methods

    • Cognitive disabilities


  • Search engine optimization
    • Meta elements (http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_meta.asp) in Head of a Web page helps searches recognize what the page is about, but you want to have the right vocabulary and not too much of it
      • Google Search penalizes pages with too many Meta words, particularly if they repeat

    • Recognize that Headers (h1, h2, h3, etc.) have significance to assistive technologies, which will interpret
      them as the topic, subtopic, subsubtopic, etc. of the page content
      • Voice browsers allow the user to navigate the page by the headers. Logical headers help the user go quickly to the content they are looking for


  • Common problems
    • Pages do not have navigation; not clear who owns it, what context it is in
      • Have information in page, such as in the header
      • Identification does not have to take up much space; a linked logo in an upper corner may be sufficent

    • Important to have consistent layout so people have an idea of what to expect
    • Important information is only in graphics, such as PowerPoint slides; have the information in the page HTML too.
    • When people print a page, is it readable; have a print stylesheet that formats it for hardcopy use
      • Be sure the printout has the URL of the page

    • Drop down menus can be inaccessible
      • There are methods for doing drop-down menus that are accessible and methods that are not accessible

      • How do people with cognitive difficulties work with menus is an open questions; research needed!


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