Grand prize winning entry in the AIR Austin 04 competition, with frogdesign
The AIR Austin event is an annual build-off to promote accessibility on the web. It challenges teams of web professionals to create a new, accessible website for a local non-profit, with the build taking place during a single 8 hour day.
After some success in a similar previous event, I had frog's support in creating a team for the '04 event. We were paired up with the Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum - a local highlight with a fairly extensive existing website, in need of overhaul. The radically compressed schedule called for flawless teamwork, great client communication and cooperation and a clear vision of the objective. We were fortunate to get them all. We also brought deep experience and some handy tools and processes to the table
The competition rules allow just over a week for preparation for the build day. My project plan called for parallel development of the site's visual design, IA and new content. The new design quickly took shape - steered by the inspiration from museum and garden itself, client-feedback, marketing directives and technical and time constraints. Accessibility was kept to the fore, with continual validation of ideas against a range of accessibilty scenarios. A need for new content was identified to augment the visual information provided by photos. Existing pages were edited and re-structured to fit the expected template and improve accessibility by applying a consistent and logical page structure.
On build day we arrived prepared, with the team quickly turning raw text and image files, photoshop comps and an IA outline into a rapidly emerging web site. By the end of the day, almost 100 pages and many 100s of graphic, Flash and other assets were uploaded to a staging server for judging. Our entry plaed 1st in the Formula 1 category - which considers and rewards the accessibility of multi-media content, forms and other rich or complex web accessibility challenges.
Within frogdesign, the success of this project continues to trickle down, with the profile of accessibility in design raised and the value of community and volunteer effort re-demonstrated.
