Matthew Edward King

Managing usability for people with disabilities in a large web presence

The case for ensuring that Web sites are usable by people with disabilities is strong in light of the World Wide Webs ubiquity as an essential customer interface for most organizations, the considerable disposable income of people with disabilities, and a growing number of accessibility regulations being applied to public Web interfaces. For small Web sites having a few thousand pages managed by a single centralized IT (information technology) department, ensuring accessible content is a well-understood process supportable with a variety of off-the-shelf solutions. For organizations owning multiple large sites containing millions of pages of content authored by hundreds or thousands of employees and applications, standards compliance management is significantly more complex in general and is particularly challenging in the context of accessibility. This paper describes the design and development of processes and solutions for establishing and maintaining accessibility for a very large Web presence. This includes site templates employing advances in coding techniques that offer dramatic usability improvements for users with disabilities and efficient enterprise-wide compliance-monitoring processes that cover all accessibility standards, including standards requiring human judgment to evaluate.