Lesson 11Post-design steps: how to implement and monitor your accessible design?
Notion 79
Why continue monitoring your design after development?
Target skills
Post-design implementation
Your work does not stop after you've completed the design of your digital project. Your initial design will be confronted with feasibility constraints and other practical issues. Also, the exhaustivity (or full consideration) of the design specifications delivered to the web integrator (the person in charge ofs setting up and integrating information and datas on a website) will be a determining factor. The sensitivity of the integrator to accessibility issues might not be at the level of the initial design expectations.
Moreover, some elements are not visible when delivering a layout: attributes and HTML tags are expected to build an accessible web page, but are not always specified. For example, using images in a design implies making these images accessible. The same applies to forms, buttons, menus, content structure and any other element.
Contributions
Once the design is confronted with the actual content, new issues could arise. For example, your contributors could have different preferences regarding the length of texts, kinds of images, use of formatting, etc. As described in the previous notions, these preferences have an impact on making content accessible or not. Editorial guidelines can be helpful to make sure everyone is on the same page and for future contributions not to go against the initial design specifications. If there are many contributors, we could imagine enforcing these guidelines using a specific tool to add contributions, such as a limited text editor with a few formatting options.
Updating features
A web page is not always meant to stay static. Beyond new contributions, new features could be implemented based on user feedback, for accessibility reasons or otherwise. Such changes may require an audit to ensure that they are compliant with web accessibility standards.
Conclusion
Once the initial design process is over, the time has come to implement the mock-ups and other design specifications. Moreover, the design and content will evolve over time, so a regular check-up can be useful to measure the gap between the original design specifications regarding accessibility and the actual implementation.