Featuring its usual successful mix of practical workshops, panels, oral presentations and networking opportunities, this year’s conference addresses the twin challenges of the global economic crisis and environmental sustainability.

The ICT infrastructure stream includes sessions on installing services remotely, free and cheap tools, rolling out IT infrastructure to inexperienced staff and clients, cloud computing, IT security, saving money by working collaboratively and more.

The Community Building and Social Media stream features a wide range of case-studies on how organisations are using web 2.0 to engage, connect and empower their clients and communities.

Practical and interactive workshops provide great opportunities to learn new skills such as pod-casting, writing for the web, and managing e-newsletters, or to focus on how we can work together to minimise the risks of climate change.

I’m particularly looking forward to Gian Wild‘s web accessibility workshop. Web accessibliity is not something that most nonprofits have got to grips with and Gian’s got good form: she worked on the very first Australian accessible web site and was the accessibility consultant for the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games.

But what if your site’s visitors are split into groups with distinct and very different needs and different intellectual abilities? How does a single website serve both people with a learning disability, and health and social care professionals? Let’s see how the Mencap website – a design I particularly admire – successfully tackles this.

Using video

Mencap’s home page engages the eye with a huge image of one of their clients and a quote from him. At this stage you’ll still see the rest of the home page and all the menus. Click the photo and you get a smoothly animated transition to a video of Ronnie talking about how he’s in charge of his own budget. This is a case of choosing the right medium for the right audience: video and audio allow Mencap to provide information without using a lot of text. Video is also used to tell stories and share clients’ own point of view throughout the website, including the sections for professionals and families: that strikes me as a good idea because it helps to reinforce the person-centred approach of the organisation.

Presenting information for people with a learning disability

Now notice the four large links and click the one that says My Life. Easily understood words that link to a landing page that’s obviously still on the same website, with the Mencap logo, but which has none of the usual navigation menus. In this section – obviously aimed at clients rather than professionals – we find limited text, just a few large links (including one back to the home page) and great use of video and audio. Notice how the Mencap logo’s colour has been used to indicate which page you are currently on. Minimalistic web design is used because it meets the users’ needs, not just because it looks good.

A more complex page layout for professionals

Now, back on the home page, click the big link that says Professionals and you get a very different experience. In this section you get all the navigation menus, plenty of text, more complicated sentences and jargon appropriate to the professionals using the website.

Resources

If you’re planning or designing a website for learning disabilities, what should you be reading? Start with some detailed advice from the Foundation for People with Learning Disabilities (make sure you click the More Information link).

Then take a peek at Antonia Hyde’s slideshow about Rich media and web apps for people with learning disabilities.

This was a great example of how not to create a website. The website had frames, obscured text, whizzy animation and weird Monty Pythonesque people jostling and peering over the top of the site. Listen to the downloadable Glaucoma Hymn! It’s surreal, soothing and unnerving all at the same time. Vincent Flanders made a short and amusing video commentary on this website back in 2006.

One slight redesign later…

This website changed in early 2009. The glaucoma hymn and the Monthy Python heads are gone – presumably because the Association realised they were being laughed at. You can no longer click on an animated winking eye to play an Elvis song.

But the difficulties for visually impairmed users remain. Take the big buttons saying Now! and Click here to Register! There’s no ALT (alternative) text on those images, so a blind person using screen reading software won’t have a clue how to apply to attend the congress. There’s also no ALT taxt on the image that announces the congress so they won’t even know it’s happening! This is still the worst nonprofit website in the world.

The competition was called Full Code Press and pitted an Australian team against a New Zealand team. Team members were thrown together to design a nonprofit’s website and had only a day to plan and design it. Someone involved described it as a geek Olympics!

The New Zealanders designed the disability advocacy website and the results look impressive, it’s a clean and modern design with good use of colour and its accessibility credentials are excellent. The team made the decision to build their own content management system (CMS) in PHP. Inevitably with any product designed so quickly there were going to be bugs, many of which were fixed after launch. A year and a half later the Association has a few ongoing problems with making content edits and with a member registration form that doesn’t register members.

The other team decided to use the Drupal CMS and I wonder whether that wasn’t a better long-term solution? Support is a big issue when you commission your website, who’s going to sort out any problems that arise? There are plenty of Drupal (and Joomla and WordPress) developers out there who can help you.

The interviews with the team leaders on the Full Code Press home page are well worth a read to get some idea of how decisions are made within a creative but pressed for time web development team.

But today I finally got the www.baptcare.org.au website to validate – and it’s only taken a whole year, hurrah!

If you run a website, why not go to http://validator.w3.org/ and test its pages (not just the home page) for HTML errors? If you find any, instruct your web designer to fix them, although if you didn’t originally insist on standards compliance they might well refuse. If you’re commissioning a new website, insist on 100% validation in the contract, and be clear that you’ll withhold payment until it’s achieved.

What types of errors needed fixing on the Baptcare site? Here are a few of the most common ones:

• An XHTML DOCTYPE was changed to a transitional HTML and that solved about 75% of the errors.
• Some tags ended in /> and some in just >. I changed them all to > to match the DOCTYPE.
• Tags were nested incorrectly. For example, there were dozens of <a> anchor tags that contained <h3> heading tags, like this <a><h3></h3></a>. It should have been the other way round.
• There were plenty of lonely, forgotten </p> tags sitting there on their own with no preceding <p> tag.
• Lots of ampersands & in URL links had to be changed to &amp; in order to validate.

So do all Baptcare’s pages now validate 100%? Well, let’s be honest, no. There’s still one recurring error I haven’t got rid of yet, an empty <ul></ul> that the CMS automatically sticks in some pages and not others. That’s technically a validation error because an unordered list should contain one or more <li> list items, but let’s be reasonable… it’s not the end of the world!

And I’m ignoring the Locations page which currently has over 500 errors (originally it was 1,400 which is a quite impressive figure!) and which I intend to completely replace soon with a new, standards-compliant version incorporating the Google Maps API.

1. Is your HTML code valid?

   The code on your website should meet certain standards. Use this free tool to check the pages on your website for errors: http://validator.w3.org. The results are full of techie jargon so let’s make this simple for you: if you get a green banner saying “this page is valid” then your site passed the test; if you get a red message then it failed and you should ask your web designer to correct however many errors are listed.

2. What about your CSS?

   CSS code dictates how your website looks: its fonts, sizes and colours, widths of columns, margins and backgrounds etc. Use this free tool to check the code for errors:  http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator and let your web designer know if you find any.

3. Can Google find the pages on your website?

   Get yourself a Google account and sign up for the free Webmaster tools. The Sitemap tool will tell you whether Google can or cannot reach all the pages on your website. If Google can’t find some of your pages, it probably indicates a web design fault, most likely a problem with your navigation links. You can do a more basic version of this test by simply typing “site:www.yourdomain.org” into Google and checking whether all your pages are listed.

4. Identify the missing links

   The links from your website to external websites will need updating occasionally. Other websites may change their address, delete pages or even disappear completely. Use the W3C’s free Link Checker tool to check individual pages or the Dead Links tool to check an entire site at once  – it may take some time so go make a coffee and come back later.

5. Are font sizes resizable?

   In Internet Explorer select Page > Text > Largest. If all the text on your website increases in size then well done. If not then your site probably uses fixed font sizes e.g. 12pt. Ask your web designer to change them to variable sizes e.g. using percentages or ems. This will benefit visitors with poor eyesight.

6. How many other websites link to your site?

   If your website is to attract visitors you need a lot of other sites to link to yours. You could use Google to find out how many websites link to yours by typing in “link:www.yourdomain.org”. However, if you try the same search in Altavista you’ll actually get a more accurate result. If you find that only a few websites link to you, start emailing other websites in your area of work to politely request a link.

7. Where are your contact details?

   Are your contact details on every page of your website? If not, is there a prominent link to a page with your contact details on it? You should at least provide your address, phone and email and registered charity number. If you expect people to visit your building, a map will also be helpful. You’d be surprised how many charity websites fail this basic test.

8. Check your website statistics

   Every organisation needs statistics for how many people visit their website, how many pages are looked at, which are the most popular pages etc. Start checking your stats monthly and making a note of the number of visitor sessions and page views. Hopefully, if your content is good and you’re promoting your website well, you’ll see a steady increase. If your website is popular, produce a couple of simple graphs for your management committee to show them how worthwhile the website is. If not, start a campaign to get your website noticed.

   Don’t have statistics? Unsure how to understand them? Take a look at some of the discussions on the TechSoup web building forum, especially October 2007′s online event about web analytics.

I’d be very interested to know what results you get. Please come back to this website and leave a comment or ask a question!

Firstly, the case was certified as a class action on behalf of blind Internet users throughout the country under the Americans with Disabilities Act; and secondly, the court held that similar websites are required by Californian law to be accessible.

By having an inaccessible website, retailers are discriminating against many of their potential customers. That’s why the President of the National Federation of the Blind said in a statement:

“This is a tremendous step forward for blind people throughout the country who for too long have been denied equal access to the Internet economy.  All e-commerce businesses should take note of this decision and immediately take steps to open their doors to the blind.”

Web accessibility standards and laws apply in many countries – here’s a list of countries and relevant legislation. The Disability Discrimination Act covers UK websites and if you’re in the UK it’s worth knowing that the charity Abilitynet can give you advice and a free accessibity check of your own charity’s website. Plus, the ICT Hub publish an excellent free Web Accessibility Pack which all charities should read.

If you work for a charity and you’re commissioning your website, read the first short section of this booklet. It tells you why accessibility matters, what to expect from your web designer and how to check that work is done to standard. If you will be writing the content for the site, putting text and images onto the pages, read the second short section of the booklet. If you’re a web designer, sorry but you get the biggest section of the booklet, the one that goes into detail on the technicalities of writing accessible html and css and other code.

Download the web accessibility guide (PDF)