Flow project: Equality and Human Rights Commission - Accessible and inclusive
The Equality and Human Rights Commission asked Flow to research and design an accessible website for them. But this wasn't your run of the mill accessibility project. The Commission's site had to set a world-wide example for accessibility and inclusivity.
Everyone at Flow really understands the importance of inclusive and standards-compliant design. It allows more people to access more of your information or services more of the time. So working on a project like this was a great opportunity to show how things should be done.
We were collaborating with Parity (development) and 35Communications (brand and visuals). From Flow's side the bulk of the project work was handled by Dan Taarin, and he was assisted by Pete Gale and Leisa Reichelt. Well done to all!
Inclusive design
Flow and the Commission agreed that just considering technical accessibility and WCAG compliance was not going to be enough. We had to understand the needs and challenges of people in all sorts of different situations, and design a site from the ground up to address them. To make this a reality, we stuck to a number of key principles:
- Design for accessibility from the outset, rather than trying to retrofit accessibility later
- Accept inclusive design requirements as qualities rather than limitations to design
- Use tried and tested IA, UI, writing, and visual design solutions
- Bear in mind what can be achieved with standards-compliant coding to ensure accessibility - especially on forms, navigation and document structure
- Use plain and simple English as an accessibility factor throughout the UI design and content.
A key part of the approach was to use inclusive personas. By creating target personas with a very demanding range of requirements and abilities, the design team made sure that their designs were inclusive from the ground up.
Inclusive research
We created a simple prototype, initially in paper and later in powerpoint. This was tested with target users and evolved into an interactive prototype using clickable jpegs to simulate a web site user experience. In total, we undertook three rounds of testing to help us expand and improve the design. A fourth round was reserved for testing the accessibility of the site, when it was nearly ready to launch.
To ensure that the site really did meet the needs of the broadest audience, we recruited users for the testing to meet Equality Impact Assessment standards. Our recruitment criteria ensured real diversity in age, gender, sexual orientation, religion and belief and race. We also worked with lots of different people with disabilities, including blind people, people with learning, perceptual or comprehension difficulties, deaf people and also people with motor difficulties. Finally we addressed geographical location within the UK and worked with welsh/english/non-native-english language speakers Welsh and English speakers, as well as people for whom English is not their first language.
Unifying the information architectures of the three legacy commissions into a single, inclusive new website took took 3.5 months and it launched in October 2007.
Take a look and see what you think. http://www.equalityhumanrights.com
3 Comments so far
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Hello,
Another interesting article.
What is your rational in offering text size changes to the user via the interface?
Do you think that text size options is of particular importance to the users of this site?
Browsers already offer this functionality. Did you find that users didn't know how to find this option via the browser?
Or maybe you required these options to be more obvious for the user regardless of their understanding of the browser?
Do you feel, and did user analysis find, that these options were beneficial to the UX?
We're certainly well aware that many folk who would benefit from larger text on web pages don't know that their browsers can offer this, or don't know where the controls are.
The folk who REALLY need to know, usually do. But people with milder vision problems, like long- or short-sightedness tend not to know. Try asking any of your friends or relatives who wear glasses and see what they tell you.
The other reason for putting the font size controls at the top is to make a point. The Commission's site needs to be exemplary in its accessibility because of the subject matter and audience. So prominent placement of accessibility features makes perfect sense.
The text resize control says "This site is coded to be highly accessible" - in a more meaningful and practical way than just stating it in the abstract.
When user testing sites that offer the text resizing in-page, users all ignored that function. I guess that those who need to know, already use their browser controls, but I can't see any harm by adding these additional controls, especially if the sites' purpose to draw attention to these issues.