The Website Redesign Nightmare
I’d like to introduce you to three people whose website redesign project is about to fail. Committing a variety of sins, there’s Walter the webmaster, Elizabeth the editor and Ian the IT guy, who work together for a public sector organisation. Read on to learn how to make sure their nightmare doesn't become yours!
Walter knows that web accessibility is somewhat important but his main success criterion is completing the project on time and under budget, especially considering how tight that budget is. He hopes their web agency together with Elizabeth will take the reign on ensuring accessibility of the new website. He knows Elizabeth is not very tech-savvy but he is confident the agency will know what to do. Then there’s Ian, who despite his technical skills, doesn’t really know how to code an accessible website, plus he resents being called in to work with the website.
With endless meetings preventing him from completing meaningful work, and a “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality Walter decides that he’ll focus on accessibility later, and perhaps do some follow up at the end to ensure compliance. The project begins and almost immediately large gaps begin to appear in the organisational responsibilities.
While Walter is busy focusing on figuring out how the new website can support the organisations key product indicators (KPIs) for channel shift and self-service, Elizabeth is busy going through old website content and re-writing some things, whilst Ian focuses on the spec details of the project. Not once does anyone stop to think about accessibility.
Fast-forward several months and the team decides they are nearly ready to go live with the redesigned website once they have done some basic testing. Three people come in, help test the usability of the website, and luckily only minor easy to fix issues show up. Finally, Walter invites a visually impaired person in to test for accessibility issues, but having been given the all clear by the usability testers, he’s not worried.
Almost immediately red flags start going up as the tester, a skilled computer user finds important parts of the content unreadable by the screen reader software, making it difficult to use the website – especially the self-service section. Additionally the parts of the website content have been uploaded in an inaccessible manner.
Frustrated, unaware of how to fix the website’s many accessibility problems, and with a deadline looming, Walter hands the task to Elizabeth. She does not know what to do and talks to the web agency. They ask for a list of accessibility issues they can work from and she then turns to Ian. Ian gets to work and finds out that most of the problems stem from their templates – something that he is neither able to fix easily or quickly.
Ian then turns to the web agency and provides them with a list. The agency responses that most things cannot be changed, as they will affect design choices and technical choices made early on in the process.
With no other options than to start from scratch or go live with an inaccessible website, the team is well and truly at a standstill. What could have been an easy and painless process has become a web team’s worst nightmare – and there’s no waking up from this bad dream!
Would you like to know where they went wrong and learn how to fill web accessibility gaps via roles and responsibilities? Then join us for our webinar - https://go.siteimprove.co.uk/how-to-fill-web-accessibility-gaps-via-roles-and-responsibilities