Accessibility, Performance and Security in web development projects and content

Today I came to watch a speech of Tim Kadlec , a web technology advocate who spoke on the subject of three of the most overlooked aspects of developing a user experience online, #accessibility, #performance and #security.

The following article is my attempt to summarize what the key take-aways from Tims speech were for me and what they taught me for my future work with content. So let‘s start.

Tim points out that even if a website is designed for a specific target group, in the end website developers cannot control which individuals with internet access will actually use their website. For example, maybe the website was developed for a target group that exludes people with disabilities. But it can happen that people falling into the target group definition originally, go through some life changing event which causes them to suddenly face difficulties with accessing your website. But you might still want them to use your website. It might still be the same Ben from Purchasing department whom you yet have to convince that you offer exactly those high quality spare parts his company needs. But the website was created without the needs in mind that can come with a disability and so the website won‘t offer a positive #userexperience to Ben in the end. You might in fact loose him as your customer, because he cannot use your website and cannot consume your content.

Why is accessibility often neglected?

Unfortunately accessibility, together with performance and security, falls into – as Tim puts it – the three unsexy pillars of #webdevelopment. These three pillars are complex and frightening topics to tackle and therefore they are often neglected in web development projects. But they are also essential. After all, if they are neglected the website won‘t run properly which will harm usability and your audiences trust. Neglecting them could even make your company face law suits as Tim pointed out. All in all it can cause harm to your brand in various ways.

As with every unsexy, but essential topic, neglecting it will cause more trouble in the end than tackling it right at the beginning.

What can we do to avoid accessibility, performance and security to be neglected?

I agree with Tim that it is neccessary to keep a broad perspective when it comes to defining our audiences and their pain points with our content and our infrastructure. We have to keep in mind that we are not only designing for an ideal audience and an ideal internet conncetion. The reality might cause our audience to need further assistance when accessing the content on our website and we should design our website infrastructure and our content in a way that pays tribute to this uncertainty.

After all we want our website and our content to be usable und useful and ideally to provide a positive user experience.

Apart from broadening our perspective when defining our audiences, we need to raise awareness for the three unsexy pillars in our development projects. If we point out what the issues are if those unsexy topics are neglected and if we highlight the advantages we get, if we pay attention to them, we can step by step increase the awareness for the topic and its value for organizations and their audiences.

Also we need to be persistent in this effort until thinking about accessibility, performance and security and their best practices becomes a standard during development projects.

As content strategists we can also contribute to this effort.

As Tim puts it, accessibility, performance and security are concepts everybody on the project team has to keep in mind. We as content strategists therefore also need to pay attention to them.

We have to think about them when we are involved in defining the content audience, when we are looking for their pain points and needs. We might have to be the ones reminding our project team that we need to apply accessibility, performance and security best practices to the channels for the content. We might even have to think about them when we create content-related guidelines.

Conclusion

Listening to Tims presentation gave me valuable insight for my career as a #contentstrategist. Maybe this article inspired you to also dig into the topics of accessibility, performance and security, no matter if you are a content strategist, developer, UX designer or anybody else with a relation to content and content infrastructure.

If you got curious, I recommend you to check out Tims presentation on Vimeo.