My first task as a content designer at the University of Southampton was to design our new accessibility statement. The challenge was to design something helpful and easy to follow for anybody having difficulties using our site.<\/p>\n
This would mean being upfront about where access issues existed and how users could access content. In short, it would be far more than something to comply with the law. It would be a practical guide and a useful insight into our work, to build trust in our site.<\/p>\n
Ideally our accessibility statement, like all our site content, would help people to do what they\u2019re trying to do.<\/p>\n
So, if somebody uses assistive tech or software, or changes settings but still struggles to access our content, they need to know there is an issue. Or if somebody wants to check if they can use a section of the site before they make the effort, they can find out at a glance.<\/p>\n
Our old statement told them that \u2018on some pages\u2019 you cannot change the line height and \u2018some tables\u2019 cannot be tabbed through, for instance. If users only have vague information on what to expect on your pages, they may not wish to try their luck visiting them.<\/p>\n
To fix this, I worked closely with content design, UX design and developer colleagues to work out where the biggest outstanding issues for those moving through the site were.<\/p>\n
Discovering the issues our users face led me into the thicket of impenetrable terminology that\u2019s often used to talk about accessibility.<\/p>\n
In the list of accessibility issues, I encountered reams of obscure language. The \u2018functionality\u2019 of a \u2018hamburger menu\u2019 button \u2018is not conveyed\u2019. \u2018Radio buttons\u2019 in the \u2018filter section\u2019 are not \u2018programmatically exposed\u2019.<\/p>\n
I asked colleagues to show me some issues and I tried them out myself where I could. I was then able to turn the consultants\u2019 technical language into content that was more task-orientated and relevant for users.<\/p>\n
Take the consultants\u2019 \u201cno indication of current focus for keyboard-only users\u201d on \u201clist items inside the hamburger menu (observed when the browser is zoomed to 200%)\u201d. This became \u201cif you use a tab key, it may not be clear which menu item you can select\u201d.<\/p>\n
Deciding how to structure the content was not easy. We\u2019d put issues in accessibility guideline \u2018priority level\u2019 order, which would not mean anything to most people.<\/p>\n
An alternative I talked about with experienced content designer colleagues was to group the content for different types of users. With this design, visual impairments would be under one heading, keyboard users under another, and so on. We discussed how useful these categories would be.<\/p>\n
There are different types of visual impairment, so do we try to break them down into ever-smaller categories? And if you need to both magnify content and use the tab key, which section on the page do you go to?<\/p>\n
This is why I designed the statement to focus on tasks people are trying to carry out, such as \u2018accessing our study pages\u2019 or \u2018using our navigation menu\u2019. We could still put the biggest issues with access higher up.<\/p>\n
People have in their mind what they are trying to do. Our job is to help them to do it, not get them to think about who they are.<\/p>\n
Making the statement useful (concrete and about what users need to know) and usable (easy to navigate and scan through) would help us to build trust.<\/p>\n
Being clear about what users can expect next would help even more.<\/p>\n
What are we working on next? What do we hope to fix soon? I asked colleagues these questions for the user. So that we could let them know what might have changed if they return to carry out other tasks important to them.<\/p>\n
You can l<\/em>ook at the accessibility statement<\/em><\/a> and <\/em>follow Lee Baker’s content design journey<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My first task as a content designer at the University of Southampton was to design our new accessibility statement. The challenge was to design something helpful and easy to follow for anybody having difficulties using our site. This would mean being upfront about where access issues existed and how users could access content. In short, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":1259,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-accessibility","category-content-design"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/27\/2022\/12\/key1.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paLsBb-kh","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/blog\/digitalteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/blog\/digitalteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/blog\/digitalteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/blog\/digitalteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/blog\/digitalteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1257"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/blog\/digitalteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1258,"href":"https:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/blog\/digitalteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257\/revisions\/1258"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/blog\/digitalteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/blog\/digitalteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/blog\/digitalteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/blog\/digitalteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}