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Building an accessible site

You can design and code to address accessibility issues. This may marginally increase the time and cost of site development. Experience in the US Government suggests that meeting accessibility guidelines adds less than 5% to the cost of site development. Considering accessibility issues at the design stage delivers much better design outcomes than fixing a pre-existing site and is likely to be a lot cheaper. This toolkit provides information on developing a tender on page 33.

When building an accessible site there are different accessibility issues that can be addressed at three different stages of the web development life cycle:

• Design - This involves designing the look and feel of the site. This is the stage to consider accessibility issues relating to the layout of the navigation and content and the use of colours and graphics.
• Development - This involves coding or building the site according to an agreed design specification. It is at this stage that the technical and coding requirements for accessible design are incorporated.
• Content - This involves inserting the content (text and images) onto the site. Accessibility issues relating to content and its presentation are considered at this stage. Sometimes content and development are completed at the same time.

See Checklist – Building a site to achieve accessibility conformance for a list of accessibility requirements organised by design, development and content.

The W3C has written a document called Selecting and Using Authoring Tools which can assist you in deciding what to use to build your site.

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