Once the pages on a website have been developed to conform to a particular accessibility standard they will need to be maintained to that standard. There is no point creating an accessible website and then adding inaccessible content. This means that any subsequent new pages must conform to the standard and any changes to existing pages must comply with the standard e.g. if a data table is inserted onto a page then it must be made accessible. It is important that whoever maintains the site has the appropriate accessibility training, tools and assistance available e.g. a content management system. It is important to remember that the person who maintains the site is not always the person that developed it.
Therefore it is very important that a company plan for maintenance, ideally this should be done at the design stage if a new site is being built e.g. following the WCAG 1.0 standard from the beginning can make the maintenance of the website much easier one it is fully developed. Once a plan is made it is also vital that all maintenance documentation be kept up to date. If the site has already been developed then it is important that maintenance plan be made as quickly as possible.
Web developers can help themselves by designing the site with maintenance in mind, using things such as page templates can reduce maintenance time and effort because if one change is made to the template then this change is mirrored on all of the other pages that use that template.
Using an external CSS to control the presentation and layout of a page not only aids accessibility but it can also make the maintenance of the website easier, because if a change is made to the external CSS then this change will be reflected on all pages that use that style sheet. It is recommended that features such as font size, font face and background colour be defined in an external CSS.
When adding or changing content on web pages it is vital that a web developer remembers the to add the necessary accessibility features to the content e.g. if a new picture is being placed on a web page then remember to include the alt text for the image.
Maintenance can be difficult if you have two versions of a page on a website e.g. a main page and a text-only page. Text only can create maintenance problems because many web developers update the main page but forget to update the text only page. Text only pages are also very unpopular amongst blind and partially sighted users. A web developer can minimise maintenance time and effort by producing one version of each page on the website. Although a web developer can use Cascading Style Sheets to create a text-only version of a website that does not lose any of the content. The text-only version of the BlingAisa website gives an example of how a text-only version of a website can be created using Cascading Style Sheets.
Alternativly a server-side script such as PHP could be used to generate and display the different versions of a page. If such a script is used then the maintenance time and effort can be reduced, as the scripting languages can provide different presentation of a page without any maintenance of the different versions being required.
It is important that a web developer structures the HTML code clearly as this can aid the maintenance of the HTML code. If the code is structured clearly then it will make it easier for the web developer to fix errors in the HTML code that automated checking tools are unable to find or fix. It is also considered vital that a web developer include a HTML DOCTYPE at the beginning of the code for each page. This tells the automated checking tools what version of HTML is being used on the page. Once the checking tool has this information they know which HTML specification to compare the code against when they are checking it for errors.
Some web developers who trying to make an inaccessible website accessible may experience problems when trying to decide which archived pages should be made accessible because a website may have a large number of archived pages. Therefore a web developer may not know which pages to make accessible. It is recommended that a web developer create a timescale for making archived pages accessible. If a user reports that an archived page is inaccessible then making the reported page accessible should be made a top priority. Otherwise a web developer can follow the timescale. A web developer should remember that archived pages do not necessarily have to meet the same accessibility standard as the new pages on a website. The new pages could meet the WCAG 1.0 “AA” standard while the archived pages may only meet the WCAG 1.0 “A” standard. If a web developer chooses this approach then this should be documented in the Web Accessibility Policy.
It is recommended that an email address to included on the website so that a user can report any accessibility problems on the site e.g. an archived page not being accessible. It is recommended that this email address be included as part of the Web Accessibility Policy.
Webtesting is a method that can be routinely used for ensuring that a website remains consistently accessible after any maintenance or development step.