The Advocacy Consortium

The Advocacy Consortium of Greater Rochester for College Students with Disabilities is a non-profit organization consisting of professionals from colleges, high schools, and vocational schools in the Rochester area. Together, the organization serves thousands of students with disabilities, their parents, and the professionals who advise them. In August 2009, the Consortium teamed up with RedBottle Design to develop a site that would extend their reach to the web.

As a website intended for many audiences, the project presented RedBottle with several unique challenges.

The initial challenge for RedBottle was designing the layout and graphic design of the site with usability by students with disabilities in mind; this challenge was addressed in three ways. First, RedBottle ensured that the site design used high-contrast colors, large fonts, and large target areas for buttons and links to make information easy to locate, read, and interact with. Second, to compensate for possible color blindness, RedBottle purposely selected theme colors that would remain high-contrast, readable, and still reasonably aesthetically pleasing even when viewed by a color-blind individual. Third, for maximum compatibility with screen-readers or other assistive devices, RedBottle ensured that each page had a proper semantic structure; this included a proper heading structure and “hidden” additional text (hidden via CSS) to provide disabled individuals with the context they needed to effectively navigate the site without a traditional mouse and keyboard.

Another challenge overcome by the RedBottle team was the presence of three primary audiences. While some of the site content was intended for a general audience, other content was intended for more specific subgroups. This presented a challenge in creating the general site hierarchy, as well as for site administrators attempting to update content across multiple sections of the site. RedBottle leveraged a combination of Drupal’s built-in taxonomy system and some custom code to make posting content for a specific combination of audiences as easy as selecting a single option.

In addition to the publicly-facing parts of the site, the Consortium also asked for the new site to have an internal, “members only” section for them to share and collaborate on documents – including meeting minutes, presentation slides and hand-outs. To access the section, members could either use a freely-shared, common account for read-only access, or request a personal account in order to read, upload and comment on content. To accomplish this, RedBottle combined Drupal’s built-in permissions system with additional modules, including Auto-Assign Role and the CCK Content Permissions module.

The finished Advocacy Consortium debuted to the Consortium on January 20th, 2010 after less than six months of development and received almost unanimous praise. Consortium members were delighted to have a place to store meeting notes and hand-outs, and to collaborate on documents. Meanwhile, Consortium editors liked having the ability to target public-facing events and articles to specific audiences. One of the Consortium editors noted on March 25th, 2010 that, "It has been a great communication tool."