Planning/Background

This page outlines the work on resources to help plan for accessibility as of 8th October 2015.

Resources

Existing

There are three existing resources that were given a facelift at the end of 2014:

• Strategic Planning for Web Accessibility - broad planning considerations
• Improving the Accessibility of Your Website - making immediate improvements
• Developing Organizational Policies on Web Accessibility - how to create an accessibility policy

These are still in Draft status.

New

EOWG recently worked on draft resources:

• Planning Roadmap - provides more detail on planning for accessibility, currently grouped into activities related to project management phases.
  • Status: structure, first level pages, and Initiate section are drafted; other lower level pages not yet drafted
• Tips for Managing Accessibility in Tips for Getting Started - help project managers start with accessibility.

More information

Much more information on how the Roadmap has progressed is available in the Planning section of the wiki.

Approach

We need to consider how these documents fit together and what level of information should be included in each.

Recommendation

Three documents:

1. Planning Roadmap will subsume Strategic Planning for Web Accessibility and cover broad and high-level considerations.
   1. Review considerations:
      • Strategic document includes eight topics - these are included as topics in the Roadmap, some (e.g. Ensure Ongoing Monitoring and Maintenance) split out into more specific topics
      • Each topic in Strategic document includes a number of key actions - content may be suitable for inclusion into the topic, or the action may suggest additional topics.
   2. Cross references:
      • Improving document - Not likely to be referred to. May be argument for side-panel or introduction to point PMs with immediate need to this resource.
      • Policy document - Refered to in Plan > Develop accessibility policy
2. Improving the Accessibility of Your Website - Cross references:
   • Roadmap - only as part of a final note regarding strategic planning. This should require few changes.
   • Policy - only as part of a final note regarding strategic planning. This should require no changes.
3. Developing Organizational Policies on Web Accessibility - Cross references:
   • Roadmap - only as part of a final note regarding strategic planning. This should require few changes.
   • Improving - no references

and:

• Consider how Getting Started Tips for Managing Accessibility might support the more in-depth resources.

Implications of this approach

Audience for Strategic document might be best described as Accessibility Co-ordinators. The audience for the Roadmap is broader than this and tries to reach anyone involved in web projects at a planning/strategic level.

There is likely to be overlap if some areas between the Roadmap and the Improving. The need addressed by the Improving document will be touched on in the Roadmap, but not in as focused a fashion. This overlap already exists with the Strategic document.

Other Approaches

• Keep all four documents
  The existing documents contain valuable information for specific audiences with well referenced URIs. Keep them and make the Roadmap a much more comprehensive, involved document that covers much more than the existing documents. The topic of strategic planning is dependent on many organizational factors, so how to make a one-size-fits-all in-depth resource presents quite a challenge.
• Keep two documents
  The policy document and the Roadmap. The policy document is a how-to that is referenced from all the other documents so that would be kept. The Roadmap document could be expanded to address the same user needs as the Strategic and Improving documents. This would require a bit of a change in how the Roadmap is presented to manage the different audience needs, but this may be a suitable return to presenting this document in a more dynamic fashion, where what is presented is filterd by user specificed need.
• Split out the Roadmap to cover and expand upon the Strategic and Improving documents
  This would require potentially more content being incorporated into the Roadmap but then splitting it out so that it replaces the two existing documents. This reduces the problem of making the Roadmap something different. There is also the opportunity to improve the structure of the existing documents.