With six months to go until the first of the accessibility regulations’ deadlines, I’ve been thinking about how different publishing models could affect UK universities’ preparations and ambitions for accessible web content. In this post, I cover the facts of the regulations, the risks of decentralised publishing, content debt and an idea for a transformative approach to accessible content.
In late 2017 I was asked to write a strategy on how to manage and produce support documentation for the University of Warwick’s web publishing team, which develops web and mobile applications in-house.
The number of web applications had increased since I joined Warwick in 2012. Help pages were in large banks of FAQs (frequently asked questions). Over time, they had become difficult to navigate and keep up to date. After a successful trial to incorporate documentation work with the development cycle for one application during 2016-17, there was a successful model to follow. The challenge was to identify the scope of documentation work in total and how to scale up the trial to a full service of 17 applications.
I moved this blog from WordPress to Hugo in December 2017 to learn about static site generators and to practise maintaining a site using modern processes like Git. I chose the Future Imperfect theme as a foundation and put my own styles in add-on.css, which takes precedence over the theme’s stylesheet main.css.
