Yesterday at HighEdWebDev 05 in Rochester, Richard Ells from The University of Washington offered interesting insights about web accessibility for higher ed websites and shared his experience on integrating the famous Section 508 requirements and the W3 standards into website management workflow in a session titled “Building Accessibility Into The Workflow”.
After attending this session, Brian Phelps, who agreed to be our very-own correspondent at the conference, filed the following report.
By comparing the Section 508 and W3C-WAI accessible design requirements with Web site management workflow patterns, we will identify where in the Web management process the decision and action points are for accessibility. The objective is to make in-depth accessible design an inherent and efficient part of the creation and maintenance of a Web site, whether it is maintained by hand, with a Web programming language and database such as PHP and MySQL, or with a content management system. Including non-HTML content such as PDF and scripting in the process will also be discussed.
Richard illustrated some of the challenges inherent in designing accessible web pages. He cited 16 discrete criteria outlined in Section 508 1194.22 standards that define accessibility.
He then described several attempts to create systems that would produce web content meeting these standards, like a Decision Tree, Basic Publication Workflow, and Opportunistic Reuse Workflow.
He sorted the requirements into groups that could be satisfied by specific roles in the production process:
- Alternative and associative text
- Technologies
- Graphics and color
- Usable design
- Alternative pages with equivalent information and functionality
Richard briefed the crowd on the success he had in breaking the content production workflow into a Decision Tree by Roles and Swimlanes, which assigned certain individuals responsibility for specific kinds of content and accessibility responsibilities.
Again referring to the 16 discrete criteria outlined in standard 1194.22, he outlined how by thinking through the CMS process, the participants could focus on Elements and Attributes, Technologies, Table Structure, Templates and Stylesheets, and Other.
He concluded by advocating that it is important to build in accessibility by thinking about content as components, e.g., graphics, tables, scripts, CSS, or color, and how each component needs to be made accessible by some means.
