Advertorial: Designing accessible websites for housing associations

“If we make the website accessible, is it going to be bland and cost a fortune to build?”

We get asked this question often, but thankfully there is a change in attitude towards accessible website design. For those of you commissioning a new website project this will help you write a better plan. It will also give you the confidence that you can achieve accessibility on a budget and still have a website that looks great!

Where to start?

It seems intuitive to start at the beginning, but sometimes it’s difficult to define the beginning. Because accessibility covers so many aspects and so many needs that often clients and developers find it difficult to agree on where to start. And where to start is so important, because it will influence everything you do throughout the whole project and beyond the go live date.

Focus groups are a great way to start a project. It helps you define your accessibility guidelines and how that blends with the needs of the website you’re creating. We like to run the focus groups with the local communities that a housing association represents. We find sometimes the clients are so close to the job they miss the obvious. We also make sure that the developers and designers, along with key staff members working on the project attend these sessions.

Researching accessible design can be daunting as there are so many different opinions out there. The RNIB is a great place for detailed guidelines, but your first port of call should be to the W3C Web Accessibility introduction – this will give you the fundamentals you require.

How do you know you got it right?

This can be a difficult question to answer. Did you engage with focus groups and take your research onboard? Is the housing association you built the site for creating accessible content and maintaining those standards? Thankfully you can test and measure your site in various ways.

User groups are key to finding out if you have hit the mark. You will learn two things:

At Cole AD we design the user testing, we find a suitable venue that will accommodate everyone’s needs and deliver the testing and compile the outcomes. You will often hear that independent user testing is better, but in our experience allowing your designers and developers to see actual users navigate the website is a huge benefit to everyone.

We have long been an advocate of accessible design, not only for websites, but for all types of graphical communication. If your housing association requires any assistance or just some advice, please get in touch - we want to help make accessible design the norm.

Thanks for reading!

Garry McCann, Creative Director at Cole AD

garry@cole-ad.co.uk

www.cole-ad.co.uk