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Co-designing an accessible online resource about a distressing subject using a web CMS

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Healing Justice Ldn (HJL) builds capacities, skills and infrastructures to support community-led health and healing.

Trigger warning: This guide mentions suicide in relation to the UK welfare system. We'd like you to engage with the Guide in a way that honours how you’re feeling and that prioritises care. Please do what’s right for you at this time.

Use this Guide if you want to develop an inclusive and accessible resource about a distressing issue. And if you’re creating the resource alongside people with lived experience.

To create inclusive and accessible online resources, it’s crucial to understand the harmful experiences people have had, their impact, and to design alongside individuals with lived experience.

Jump to steps
How they set it up:
Developers built or adapted it for us
Setup costs:
Co-creation of timeline with disabled activists: £7156, Design Research, Sitemap & Wireframing, Website Design and Frontend & Backend Development: £10,000, Easy Read Producer: £535, Access Focus Group (Participant Fee and Access Provisions): £500
Ongoing costs:
Green Web Hosting, SSL and Domain Name: £140 per year, ReadSpeaker: £270 per year
Guide in use since:
October 2023

Steps to creating an online resource that includes distressing content

Co-designing means working alongside people affected by an issue, instead of making assumptions and decisions about what they need. It respects people’s skills, knowledge and experience. Following its principles will help your outputs reflect people’s actual needs.

Co-design’s main principles are:

  • sharing power

  • prioritising relationships

  • using participatory methods

  • building people’s capacity

If you’re taking a co-design approach consider how you:

  • support people to make meaningful contributions

  • enable their voices to be heard

  • create collaborative and inclusive decision-making processes

What is co-design?

Centring community needs

Working with community partners and people with lived experience

Healing Justice Ldn builds capacity, skill, and infrastructure to support community-centred health and healing. Its Deaths by Welfare Project investigates the links between welfare reform and people’s deaths, including suicides. 

The project is co-designed and co-produced with:

A core part of the project is a co-produced resource (a timeline and database of evidence) on a website. It shows how welfare reform, and austerity policies, have harmed and led to the death of disabled people. The timeline also traces the expertise, knowledge, resistance, and leadership of disabled people and their families.

Rooted in disability justice, the timeline emerged from a need identified by disability activists. It built on over a decade’s worth of research and action by disabled people who wanted their collective experiences to be made visible.

The team that created the timeline have lived experience of disability. And it worked with people with lived experience.

You need to understand the steps people could go through when using your new resource. Creating a visual representation of these steps and what happens during each one is called journey mapping.

Doing this will help you understand what people might think, feel and do while viewing the resource. It can also highlight what aspects might be difficult for them. And if there are things about their experiences you need to find out more about.

Healing Justice Ldn co-created a draft timeline with the Disability News Service. It shared the draft with 3 disabled people, and a lawyer who supported bereaved families, and asked for feedback.

After making changes based on the comments it received, it shared the timeline publicly as a Google doc, asked for feedback, then incorporated it. Healing Justice Ldn then started working with the Access Power Visibility collective to turn the timeline into an accessible website. As part of this process, they mapped out:

  • different people who might use different timelines

  • how they might want to use the timeline (for example, to collate info for court, or to understand a family member’s death)

  • barriers they might experience in using the timeline

The mapping generated new questions as Healing Justice Ldn tried to identify what it did and didn't know. It also realised that it had strong connections with some groups, but not with others.

This helped it produce different journeys, reflecting a range of perspectives.

Healing Justice Ldn tagged the timeline’s content by theme to make it easier to find key information. Examples of tags include: ‘sanctions’, ‘misinformation’ and ‘government and media stigmatisation’.

To make sure people are supported and cared for during the design process, you need to:

  • prioritise their well-being and dignity

  • respect their privacy

  • provide clear and concise information about the activities they will be involved in

  • create a comfortable and supportive environment during research sessions

  • be sensitive to the potential emotional impact of talking about distressing topics

  • offer compensation for their time and effort.

Almost everyone Healing Justice Ldn worked with on the timeline:

  • was disabled

  • had close ties to disability activism

  • had experience of the welfare system

  • was bereaved by the welfare system.

The organisation wanted to avoid being extractive and replicating the welfare system’s violent and bureaucratic processes. So it:

  • paid people for their time and used simple payment processes

  • used HJL’s community agreements to hold and guide conversations with care

  • provided a breakout room with an assigned facilitator for online discussions and events if people needed support

  • made additional care/support budgets available

  • provided aftercare resources.

Healing Justice Ldn tested the timeline with people who’d been involved in the research stages of the project.

Accessible websites, apps and platforms are inclusive. This means that the majority of people can use them, whether they are disabled or not.

Accessible digital products are:

  • perceivable: people can understand the information being presented

  • operable: everyone can use the navigation and interface (the part you see and use when interacting with the product)

  • understandable: people can easily understand the information on your site’s pages, how to find the information they want, and how to use the site’s tools and features

  • robust: your website can be accessed on a range of devices, and by assistive technologies.

These guides explain how you can improve the accessibility of your website, and identify 3 common barriers on your website.

When it came to accessibility, the Healing Justice Ldn and Access Power Visibility team wanted to:

  • avoid making assumptions about people’s access needs

  • ground its work in the social model of disability and in Sins Invalid’s principles of Disability Justice

  • make sure that accessibility was built into every part of the design process

  • ensure people’s agency and dignity were affirmed through design (content warnings and filters) and content (centring agency and resistance).

It also wanted to go beyond the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (the main international standards for web accessibility.) But they acknowledged that 100% accessibility doesn’t exist, because individual access needs differ. This highlighted the need to design varied access provisions on the site, to account for a range of access needs.

Healing Justice Ldn and the Access Power Visibility Collective ran an online focus group with people with a variety of access needs. It asked them to bring examples of sites that work well for their access needs, and ones they found challenging. The organisations also presented initial wireframes and in-progress designs. This enabled them to receive feedback on the design, accessibility and tone of the website. They also sought advice from accessibility consultants.

The team used the focus group’s results to design for people with different accessibility needs and increase the timeline’s accessibility.

The timeline’s accessibility settings page supports people’s access needs. It allows people to choose their access options before they enter the website. This takes the social model of disability as a design provocation. It explores the ways that websites can allow people to tailor their experience to their access needs from the beginning. Rather than as a secondary response to designed barriers on a website.

Anxiety, stress and trauma make understanding and processing information difficult. Applying trauma-informed principles when you’re creating distressing content can help make it easier for people to digest it. It can also help them feel less overwhelmed.

Content Design London’s principles of trauma-informed content are:

  • safety: avoiding causing further harm. Use content or trigger warnings or a safe exit option

  • trust: building in trust wherever you can. Do this by making your content easy to find and using language that’s easy to understand

  • choice: as much as possible, letting people choose how and when they access your content. Telling them if there’s more information elsewhere. And offering different ways to support them

  • collaboration: creating your content alongside people who’ve experienced trauma

  • empowerment: making your content clear and accessible to support people to act independently, make their own decisions, or learn something new

  • cultural consideration: writing respectfully and inclusively about things like age, race, gender and disability. And considering values, language, beliefs and customs.

(Healing Justice Ldn didn’t use these specific principles when it was developing the timeline.)

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How to make your writing more accessible

Healing Justice Ldn was creating a tool about a violent and dehumanising system that takes away people’s autonomy and choice. The evidence gathered together in the timeline is enraging and devastating. The team took care with how to communicate this.

The timeline is deeply informed by:

It was essential to honour disabled people’s experiences, creativity and resistance. The team also wanted to balance remembering and honouring individual people’s lives and deaths, with showing the scale (and the patterns) of harm caused by the welfare system.

Healing Justice Ldn aimed to create a resource that highlighted these patterns. This is useful because it makes it possible to see that harms are features of the system, not simply ‘flaws’ or ‘mistakes’.

The timeline needed to avoid being overwhelming and bureaucratic – so as not to recreate people’s harmful experiences of the welfare system.

So the team showed early content drafts to a focus group of disabled people. The group told them that the content would be easier to engage with if it was broken down into small sections, and shown piece by piece instead of all at once. This would:

  • make content more accessible and digestible

  • help people be aware of what was coming next as they navigated the content.

Participants also told Healing Justice Ldn that the entries on the timeline needed to be shorter and easier to understand, without overexplaining, or being patronising.

The timeline’s 3-step introduction was informed by user research. It helped Healing Justice Ldn and Access Power Visibility understand how to set the tone, and give people time to prepare themselves for reading the timeline’s content.

The timeline’s language was inspired by disabled activists. Many of the people using the timeline are disabled people with direct experience of damage from the welfare system.

There can be a tension between designing with care and infantilising people. The team included trigger warnings about distressing content, including suicide. This gave people a way to make an informed choice about which content they consumed. Healing Justice Ldn had extensive conversations about whether or not to include methods of suicide. In the end they decided not to.

Further information

Contact Dr China Mills, Head of Research at Healing Justice Ldn: [email protected]