If your organization wants to redesign its website, don’t forget to include DubBot in your tool kit. The accessibility testing capabilities can be incorporated from the start, including for secure development environments.
Just thinking about a website redesign can make many people weak in their knees and break out in cold sweats. The process can be very arduous and can last for many months.
Interestingly, here at DubBot, we have seen a tendency to think that the DubBot app is the final step in the redesign process—checking for accessibility. But actually, it’s a powerful tool throughout the entire process. Think of it as a reliable partner, available to assist you at every stage of the process.
DubBot can help you ensure accessibility, best practices, and SEO are included and tested at every stage of your website redesign, from planning and research to design and development to testing and optimization. With DubBot, you can configure automated accessibility testing for your web development site, in most cases, even if it's behind a login.
Investing in accessibility early in the development and design processes can lead to significant savings by eliminating the need for costly modifications or retrofitting later.
Take a look at the cost of retrofitting and remediating accessibility issues. Karl Groves puts it best when he compares bug fixes and retrofitting to "Boehm Curve." To paraphrase,
Fixing bugs early saves money. The cost starts low in the planning phase but balloons as development progresses. Imagine it multiplies: 1x at requirements, 5x at design, and 10x in code, reaching a whopping 150x by release!
Planning and Research
Determine the Scope
A solid website redesign project scope defines the project's boundaries and outlines everything necessary for success: responsibilities, requirements, tasks, constraints, exclusions, milestones, and deliverables.
When outlining your requirements, be sure to specify your desired WCAG compliance level. DubBot’s Help Center, Video Learning Center, and DubBlog offer valuable insights into WCAG standards and practical guidance to help you determine the appropriate level for your organization's success.
Working With an Agency
If you are working with an agency for your redesign, DubBot is designed to facilitate seamless collaboration between your agency and your internal team. You can easily include members from both organizations in the DubBot platform, creating a central hub that will help streamline communication, responsibilities, and deliverables management, ensure prioritized accessibility, and provide a clear overview of tasks and progress while keeping "scope creep" in check. Members of your agency will also have access to our Client Services team for assistance with accessibility testing and use of the DubBot app.
Examine Key Website Metrics
Review your analytic data from the past 6 - 12 months to uncover your high-performing pages and identify opportunities for improvement. Find out what's driving traffic to what pages / areas on your website and, just as importantly, what's not.
With the DubBot app, you can connect directly to your Google GA4 account with the Google Analytic Connector. This connection lets you view analytics data inline and helps you prioritize those opportunities for improvement based on real-time user traffic to your website.
Conduct a Content Review
Using DubBot’s Quality Assurance, Best Practices, and Custom Policy reporting capabilities, you can uncover pages that no longer meet your organization’s editorial style guide standards, accessibility best practices, and other custom organizational standards that keep with current branding and messaging requirements.
With DubBot’s Policies, you can create custom policies to locate legacy links that contain specific extensions (e.g., .php or .aspx) or a specific file path, such as /index/. Policies can be used to find deprecated HTML like <b> and other old tags. They can also be written to uncover fixed-width tables and images without ALT text or inappropriate (alt="filename.png") ALT text and find unwanted words, names, or outdated content or phrases. DubBot maintains a Policy Library that allows you to import policies or policy sets with just a click.
Design and Development
Define Your Visual Brand
Accessibility is more than just coding; ensure accessibility is considered from the beginning of the visual design process to avoid costly rework. Designers must consider color contrast, font size, keyboard navigation, and alternative text for images to accommodate diverse user needs.
Designers use the DubBot app to test for color contrast, alt text, proper page structure, and more. And for accessibility that requires manual testing? Here are a few resources from the DubBot to help:
- Accessibility Checklist Update: Now Includes WCAG 2.2
- How to Check Your Website for Accessibility
- Policy Set - WCAG 2.2 - Success Criteria recommended manual review
Content Creation
As the existing copy is updated and the new copy is written and added to the development website, DubBot’s Spelling and Readability checks will improve your website visitor engagement with concise and accessible web content—all spelled correctly! You can even test using multiple languages with customizable, brand-specific dictionaries.
DubBot’s SEO checks and SEO reports will verify that your website's keywords, heading structure, links, page titles, and other SEO elements are optimized for maximum search engine visibility.
Choose the Proper Framework
Developers play a pivotal role in implementing accessible designs, from writing semantic HTML to providing descriptive labels for form elements to ensuring compatibility with assistive technologies. By embedding accessibility into the development process from the start , developers build accessible websites from day one.
Testing and Optimization
Testing and optimizing your website for accessibility before going live ensures everyone can use and interact with your website. Be sure to include automated and manual accessibility testing for both desktop and mobile in your acceptance testing standards.
By taking a proactive approach, you enhance user experience, showcase your dedication to inclusion, and ensure compliance with accessibility standards.
At DubBot, we believe the most efficient approach to creating an accessible website is to embed accessibility standards and testing into the design and redesign process right from the start. We are here to provide expert guidance to ensure your website is inclusive and accessible from the outset.
"Accessibility is the result of a deliberate and managed process and should be understood as a requirement for any new project." ~ Accessibility@IOWA
