The POUR Method Inspo and Resources

03/30/2024 By Steph

POUR Method in Accessible PDF Format

The Story

When asked why did I started this accessibility journey and what’s my goal I can only think of the small business owners who started up small and scrappy like myself, sometimes decades ago. Many of them knew they needed an Internet presence, and had a website put together with very minimal up front planning into its maintenance or upkeep as technology has progressed. It’s something I see again and again with small businesses and nonprofits. I wanted to find a way to bring focus on accessibility to these customers the way I was able to do in my corporate product development roles, in a very limited budget space while also achieving the primary goal of any business, growth.

I was surprised that the journey to accessibility is not that accessible, is filled with loads of information, many options with multiple versions for site owners to sift through and understand, and no real governing body that monitors for issues on marketing websites or nonprofits. It appears from this memo that even the federal agencies that sought to uphold WCAG standards have had to have a sort of remediation of their own in the last four years, with mandates from the white house stipulating time frames and audiences that its own agencies must meet and hadn’t been executing consistently.

After Digital.gov’s accessibility summit earlier in 2024 I was excited to see the efforts being made and that arena, and in my own state of Colorado I know this is an issue being taken much more seriously within our own state and county agencies as well. It’s my hope to be able to provide small businesses and nonprofits, that don’t have the federal or state financial backing to support massive efforts including hiring auditing and execution of the necessary changes it takes to make technology WCAG compliant, tangible resources and consulting services.

The POUR Method

The Purpose

The POUR Method is intended to be a guide a quick start guide primarily for small businesses and nonprofits, though corporations could make use of some of these practices and principles as they iterate going into the future but that’s what it is it’s an iterative tool for teams to be able to reference on a regular basis as they begin new campaigns, projects acquisitions, minor restructuring and so forth. It’s intended to be easy to recall, easily transferable and trainable, easily digestible fitting in a single page PDF file. It is inspired by Agile software and product development principles life cycle principles and the WCAG itself while also taking into account that the primary goal of any business is growth.

POUR stands for the principles of accessibility Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust they’re arranged into a funnel shape with the idea that we are pouring into our accessibility efforts. When we actually do these actions we are building from the bottom up much as these businesses have done bootstrapping themselves, pulling themselves up from the bottom up to become something more. When executing on the Method we begin with action items that many of the small business owners and nonprofit founders that I speak with can execute on their own as many do some sort of the management of their marketing websites especially through WordPress and other CMS system. Not only that, the UR principles called out 4 distinct guidelines, of nearly 80 total, that must be addressed.

The Process

We begin the process with automated tools and auditing to make this as fast as possible, I have provided links to two free tools, Lighthouse of which is included in the inspect section of the Chrome browser and AccessibilityChecker.org, which I have used to prove that it not only helps with accessibility scores and access but also with search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, to see more on this effort on my own website check out this blog post. After completing the audit, and based on what the results of those reports are, I provide two distinct changes within website code that again small business owners and nonprofit founders often can make on their own. While the accessibility changes would be available immediately upon publish of the updated web pages, there are SEO benefits would take longer to see as noted in that blog post.

Screenshot of a slide from the mentioned blog post sharing the 2 code changes to make. Updated header tags for navigation, and meaningful alt attributes on all image. — UR code changes.

Because we have made some code changes to the website, getting half-way through the POUR Method, the other half requires us to go in a little bit deeper and inspect the edits a little bit longer involving other people that could include employees, friends and family, social media following, oh and any other audiences that you have ready and easy access to. There are some benefits to this part if you are in a brick and mortar location and have the opportunity to interact with the public at large, however in all efforts I would say it’s always good to be clear on the purpose of this ask, that is, the why of what we’re asking your customers, your friends, your audience to provide you with information on accessibility of your digital experience. The clear message you’re going to give is one of empowerment to make a real change. For more on that check out my other blog post and different ways to execute on the P and O aspects of POUR Method.

Accessible PDFs

In this post I provide to you a downloadable, accessible PDF that I created after completing the GSA certification around this topic. Personally, as focused on accessibility as I am, I had not actually considered that PDF documents we’re not implicitly accessible and I was glad to have the opportunity to learn methods to continue to meet accessibility standards. Is any of this truly quick? No, but if you sit and speak with somebody living with a condition that impairs their audio, visual, motor, or cognitive abilities to interact with the Internet independently you will find that aspects of their life are not happening at a quick pace either. So while I refer to the POUR Method as a quick way to initiate accessibility practices and principles into small and non-profits organizations, it can take as long as four or eight weeks to execute properly and completely.

Accessibility for the nearly 1 in 4 living with conditions that requires us to be a topic of conversation and for those providing services or goods to anyone in the United States, must adopt a mentality that requires them to think of a few extra steps in completing any task at hand, and the printable PDF is something that I hope can live in the environments and minds of anybody creating digital artifacts for those accessing digital artifact.