The research team collaborated with a Steering Committee, and d/Deaf, Disabled, and Neurodivergent artists who took part in workshops to plan how to present the information on this website.
The features important in accessing web content discussed in the workshops included -
Style
- Shorter sections of text
- Pictures, symbols, and other visual content to support text
- No confusing, overwhelming, or difficult to access pop ups or videos playing as soon as the website opens
Colour, font, and layout
- Dark colour on light but not bright white background, single colours, single columns - with some differences in preference for light mode and dark mode reading
- Avoid use of red and green which can be difficult for users with colour reading differences
- Larger, less crowded, sans serif font settings, and option to increase font to larger size
- Use of bold, underline, italics or other markers to help follow the flow where there is a long section of text, or there is a hyperlink to another section of text, page, or resource
Accessibility features
- Use of plain English writing - rather than academic English writing - wherever possible throughout the website
- Image description for pictures, symbols, and other visual content in the website
- Transcripts, captions, and wherever possible Auslan interpretation for video content created for the website
We have built this site using the open source platform Omeka, recommended to us for it's capacity to display digital collections - Omeka provide information about their commitment to making Omeka S an accessible option for building collections and exhibits online at this link. The site is hosted via the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) Nectar research cloud,
This has allowed us to create a searchable repository which references over 10,000 persons, organisations, works, places, and events - and do so on a fixed budget.
The use of open source software has impacted the accessibility of the site - for example, this software does not include a feature to flip between light and dark mode. The website does use shorter sections of text, and images, in a recommended font size, style, and colour. The webpages have, upon testing, worked with screen readers, and we have worked to put ALT Text behind every image.
The main issue that makes our IT experts and testers estimate that this site is about 70% accessible is many of the searchable items are archival PDFs, including photocopies or scans of print materials from the 1970s and 1980s, which screen readers cannot access. We have not had the time or financial capacity to transcribe all text or list all images in >1,000 documents, however, we have included ALT text and Accessibility Tags to summarise the content in each of these documents, as demonstrated in this image.