Sector(s)

Project Team

Other organisations involved: 

Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts

Team members: 

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Organizations Involved

Community contributions

As part of the development process of the project we had the Access Hub website audited by an accessibility consultancy. 

This led to a number of valuable  improvements and contributions being contributed back to the CivicTheme project strengthening the accessibility of the theme.

Salsa Digital worked with the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts and our design partners, Today, to deliver a new user-centred website on the GovCMS platform — Access Hub. Designs were based on CivicTheme (a design system and Drupal 10 theme) with some customisations to meet Access Hub’s unique needs.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome)
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Access Hub’s challenge

Access Hub content was a set of pages on the main Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications and the Arts website. The team wanted a new, dedicated, fit-for-purpose, highly accessible Access Hub website designed and built within a limited budget.

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Access Hub’s transformation — a user-tested dedicated website

Access Hub’s transformation covered human-centred design, content design, content writing/editing and site build. Salsa Digital’s proposed solution was a GovCMS website, built using CivicTheme (a design system and Drupal 10 theme).

Access Hub design

Salsa Digital and our design partners Today kicked off the project with a 6-week design and discovery process. During this time, Today followed its usual human-centred design approach, focusing on the end users’ needs. The designs went through several iterations, based on user testing and client feedback. All designs were based on CivicTheme, keeping to out-of-the-box components when possible. However, the design did end up having quite a few custom components.

Today also worked on the best way to organise the content. This included the menu structure and user journeys. For example, a user can self-identify their situation and communication preferences:

  • I use Auslan
  • I am d/Deaf and use English
  • I am hard of hearing
  • I have speech communication difficulty

Below you can see how visual design and content design work together to help users find the information that applies to them.

Today created a range of custom icons to help with visual communication. They also created a new visual template to show how different types of calls work. Below is an example for how Video Relay calls work.

Access Hub content

Access Hub subject matter experts provided initial copy for the new website. With the new information architecture and user journeys set up by Today, our Salsa Digital content strategist needed to write new content pages and re-write others to fit with the new structure. All content pages were also edited to ensure they followed web writing best practice, including meeting content accessibility standards. While the original brief was for 20 pages of content, the final content was nearly double the size, and many of the pages needed to be long, with detailed instructions for users.

The site build

The dev work started in parallel with the content writing/editing. Although the project was being built using CivicTheme, Today’s designs did require custom frontend and backend development. The customisations included:

  • A custom header with three quick links for users
  • A custom subscribe block
  • Card customisations
  • Custom accordions so step-by-step instructions can be embedded in accordions
  • A customised sitemap
  • A print stylesheet so pages, including content in accordions, can be visually styled ready for printing
  • Custom search

Below is an example of the custom accordions for step-by-step instructions.

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The outcomes — a user-tested site on GovCMS

  • A new, visually appealing, dedicated Access Hub website
  • Many accessible features and different ways of accessing information — including videos, diagrams and images
  • User-tested and validated design
  • Updated content, maximised for the online medium
  • Quick, easy and cost-effective site build with GovCMS and CivicTheme
  • The benefits of the whole-of-government platform GovCMS, including open source code (no licensing fees), access to the GovCMS community, and a highly resilient and secure platform
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Why Drupal was chosen

The Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications and the Arts was already using GovCMS for other sites and wanted a new website on the GovCMS platform. GovCMS is a mature, whole-of-government Drupal solution. Drupal was chosen as the preferred CMS for Australia’s Federal Government through the creation of the GovCMS platform, which was launched in 2015. GovCMS is designed to make it easier for government agencies to create modern, affordable, responsive websites. Importantly, GovCMS provides a whole-of-government platform to help consolidation across government departments. The fact that Drupal is open source means there are no expensive lock-in contracts, and GovCMS can build a Drupal/GovCMS community.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

GovCMS was chosen as a mature, whole-of-government Drupal solution. Drupal was chosen as the preferred CMS for Australia’s Federal Government through the creation of the GovCMS platform, which was launched in 2015. GovCMS is designed to make it easier for government agencies to create modern, affordable, responsive websites. Importantly, GovCMS provides a whole-of-government platform to help consolidation across government departments. The fact that Drupal is open source means there are no expensive lock-in contracts, and GovCMS can build a Drupal/GovCMS community.

CivicTheme was chosen as a Drupal theme that would help Access Hub launch faster and with a reduced cost. Given Access Hub provides information to  people who are d/Deaf, hard of hearing or who have a speech communication difficulty, accessibility was the top concern / goal of the project. 

This led to a number of customisations made to CivicTheme to target users with different communication needs — including changes to cards to be more visually oriented and the use of iconography throughout the site.