Cloisters
Project type: web accessibility consulting, HTML and CSS coding, user testing
Partner: White Loop
Timescale: March 2005 - June 2005
Cloisters is a chamber of barristers in the City specialising in employment law, medical and clinical negligence, public law and judicial review. As part of rebranding the chambers with a new visual identity, they commissioned their design agency, White Loop, to focus on making the site as accessible as possible while meeting the visual design requirements of the new branding.
White Loop usually specialise in building sites for public sector organisations, and so have a good track record in building accessible sites. Even so, for this project they chose zStudio as their partner to provide consultancy and to build accessible templates in XHTML and CSS based on the screen designs approved by the client, in order to ensure that Cloisters' new site would conform with industry best-practice. Cloisters also retained us to carry out user testing involving users having disabilities, in order to validate the accessibility of the site.
Building the Cloisters site
We built the templates using the most up-to-date techniques, not just based on current best-practice but also informed by our deep experience of real-world accessible web design.
The project was challenging for one particular reason; the screens in question had been produced in line with the highest standards for visual web design, not primarily from an accessible standpoint. The difference is fundamental; sites designed by accessibility experts deliver the highest standards of accessibility by default, but tend to lack the visual sophistication that modern clients expect. They look like they were dessigned for accessibiliity, rather than visual design considerations, and as such clients are faced with choosing between two desirable but mutually exclusive goals. At the outset of a project, assuming the agency has the capability in the first place, the client is asked to choose between a site that is more accessible on the one hand, or better looking and more effective as a marketing tool on the other.
With the Cloisters project, we had an opportunity to see how far we could go without sacrificing either the visual design or the practical accessibility of the site.
As it turned out, the resulting site does suffer a little in terms of its "out-of-the-box" accessibility; colour combinations and text sizes are not those one would consider absolutely ideal, for example. Also, the site would behave better when large fonts are used if it was a liquid design rather than fixed width. However, with the use of CSS for the visual formatting, relative font sizing, and a style sheet switcher, the impact of these disadvantages is minimal, and the benefit of being able to maintain the desired look and feel from a marketing standpoint means that it is much easier to sell a client on the accessible design.
The result is that clients are no longer forced to make an absolute choice between really attractive and really accessible. They can have a site that is both, and that makes the web a better place for everyone.
User testing for the Cloisters site
Nothing can compare to getting feedback from real users, studied using the site under controlled conditions. We were asked by Cloisters to plan and execute detailed user testing for the new site with users having disabilities. With some diligent research, we were able to locate several participants with disabilities who had computers and Internet access, and who were willing and able to participate in testing the web site.
The principle behind user testing is to give each participant the same set of tasks on the site, and to examine how easily or otherwise they complete the tasks - or if they manage to complete the tasks at all. We devised a standard set of tasks, and ran the user testing in the participants' own homes using their own equipment and assistive technology.
As expected, the site performed very well, especially from a primary access standpoint. There should have been no technical barriers to their use of the site, and indeed none were found. What was shown by the exercise was a surprising amount of difficulty arising from a few - apparently minor - usability issues that affected all users; for our participants, the minor issues became magnified into problems that gave them substantially more difficulty in using the site than users without those disabilities would experience.
A great deal of valuable information was gained from running the user tests, much more than we expected considering the degree of care that had been taken with the technical aspects of building the site.
In our reporting, we provided an initial technical report designed to allow the developers to examine the issues found promptly, and a more comprehensive full report that explored the findings of the research both in more detail and from a higher level.
All the research was videotaped to allow detailed analysis of the data, and to permit audiovisual materials to accompany the report if desired.