Making Websites Accessible
7 How to Maintain an Accessible Website
Building an accessible website is easy in comparison to keeping the website lively, useful and accessible after it has been built. If the website is to remain useful it must be regularly updated - and SAIF advocates the ‘distributed approach’ to web publishing. This means that staff should ideally be able to publish their own information (i.e. they don’t give it to a third party to publish).
However, if you have a group of writers all with varying web-publishing skills - and using a variety of different publishing packages - the resulting website is unlikely to be good-looking, consistent or accessible. Why? Because the tools available at the moment don’t help publishers learn the most important skills: usable, consistent and accessible design.
In the long term writing pages for the web will be no more difficult than writing standard documents using a word processing package. However, until this happens you need to find systems that will work at the moment and whichever you choose will involve training staff to maintain an accessible website.
Keeping your website up to date
In order to keep your website accessible those who are updating it need to know why keeping the website accessible is a good idea and how to add to and edit the website without compromising its accessibility. It is also be useful to know how to test your website regularly to ensure that it is accessible.
You can’t expect staff just to know these things or to take it upon themselves to indulge in spontaneous self-teaching. The only way that staff can learn the importance of publishing accessible information on the web - and how to do it - is to provide good quality, appropriate training.
However, the training needs to be at the right level and of the right type. It is not reasonable to expect every member of staff to be:
- expert designers
- expert information architects (i.e. the effective organisation of information)
- expert HTML authors
- experts in building accessible websites
Given that we are not quite at the point where writing a web document is as easy as writing a standard word-processing document, what should staff be learning? What type of training is required?
If you are committed to maintaining a regularly updated website you need to find a way to do two things. Firstly, you need to find a way for staff to publish and edit their own pages or sections on the website and secondly, to ensure that the resulting pages remain accessible. These two goals are difficult to reconcile - but with the correct approach it is possible to achieve both.
Allowing staff to publish and edit their information
If we look at the traditional web-publishing scenario, the following situation emerges. One person within an organisation becomes interested in the web and builds a website for the organisation with few resources and little input from anyone else. This person then becomes the organisation’s "web expert".
When new information is to be added to the website it is channelled through this individual member of staff. As the demand to get information published on the web increases, he/she eventually becomes the bottleneck in the publishing process since it is highly unlikely that one person can keep up with the demands of the organisation (unless the organisation is very small).
The system then starts to break down; staff send their updates and have to wait weeks before seeing them on the web. Subsequently, they lose enthusiasm for web publishing and start thinking the process is not worth their effort. They then stop sending their documents for publication and the website stops reflecting the work of the organisation in an effective and up-to-date way.
The problem with the above method is that those who write the documents and are the experts in their own subject areas have little control over what actually goes on the web. As a result, their feeling of ownership of the website is eroded and its strengths are lost (i.e. timely information, instant feedback, interactivity and dialogue engendered by the immediacy of web publishing).
You could try to solve this problem by adding more ‘website experts’ by providing them with training or making this the person’s full-time job rather than an adjunct to the person’s main job. But this doesn’t solve the problem of ownership or participation. On top of this many organisations will insist upon another layer in the web-publishing sandwich, the editor.
Determining staff support needs
Firstly they will need some type of web-publishing application. Many people are currently using WYSWYG (what you see is what you get) web page design packages like FrontPage or Dreamweaver. These packages have become popular because they promise to free people from the burden of having to learn HTML to build pages. Should you be sending people on courses to learn to use Frontpage or Dreamweaver? Here are some things to consider before going down that route.
Using most WYSWYG web design packages can lead to difficulties because:
- they don’t produce standard, accessible HTML
- they remove the publisher from the structure created by using HTML
- their strengths don’t lie in site management but in site design (and it is crucial that you consider how to manage your website)
- they are not good at helping writers to organise their information logically or helping writers add their information to the correct part of the website
- writers are not necessarily experts in the organisation of information
It is arguable that the time taken to learn most of these packages would be more usefully spent learning some basic HTML.
So what should staff be learning? Well, for the most part accessible web pages are pages written in standard HTML and HTML is not rocket science. All HTML does is give some labels to the bits of text that make up the page (i.e. here is a header, here is a paragraph, here is a list).
Anyone who is going to publish information on the web should learn:
- some basic HTML
- why it is a good idea to publish accessible web pages
- how to write accessible web pages
Learning some basic HTML will help all publishers - no matter what applications they are using to build their websites.
Choosing a content management system
If you are really serious about your website you should be looking at using a content management system rather than a website design package. A content management system set up at the start of this process will decrease considerably the overheads for any organisation publishing their information on the web and make it easier to maintain an accessible site.
There are many different types of content management software. For more detailed information see www.camworld.com/cms/. There are two that SAIF currently recommends, although you may find other systems more appropriate for your organisation’s needs. One for small organisations is called Manila http://manila.userland.com and the other for large organisations who have their own Unix machines and RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) is called the OpenACS system www.openacs.org.
The main features of a good content management system are as follows:
- it can control access to particular web pages - writers can only edit their own pages and add to their own sections (obviously this has some drawbacks as well as advantages)
- it allows the creation of a consistent look and feel throughout the site, so assuming you have implemented good design and organisation at the outset it is easier to maintain
- it allows writers to concentrate on writing and designers to concentrate on designing
- It allows the automation of the publishing process - if editors need to approve content before it goes live - this facility can be built in to the system
Once you create templates and your website is built using accessible HTML you are already a long way down the road to maintaining an accessible website.
With such a system in place ongoing training requirements are not so arduous. For most documents writers will only need to learn some basic HTML (headers, paragraphs, lists etc). The learning curve is fairly gentle and, because it is easy to get started, you can learn as you go along.
Running a Manila site lets you carry out the entire publishing process using a web browser. Editing existing pages is very easy - all you have to do is click an ‘Edit This Page’ button at the bottom of the page and you are presented with your text to edit. Adding information is just as simple - just fill in a form with the name and text of your new page. You can also add photographs, graphics, word documents or pdf documents to your website just as easily.
With this system you don’t need to buy the application yourself. Instead, you buy into an existing provider - currently this will cost you a few hundred pounds per year. On top of that you will have to pay someone to build your site in the first place so that it is accessible and you have a consistent framework to work with.