health

Earlier this year I've redesigned the templates of the Flevoziekenhuis. The old templates really needed an update. This assignment was granted very late in the process of introducing the new corporate identity. The Flevoziekenhuis hospital building was already decorated with the new logo. And print communications and other media outings were already branded according to the new style designed by Different View. So when I got the assignment as 2Value associate, we had less then a month from initial talks to launch.

And next to visuals we had to make some navigational and accessibility improvements which lacked in the previous templates. I completely overhauled the navigation structure. I cut the amount of menus and modules by about 80%. I also took care of the Joomla 1.5 legacy mode. The website now runs fully native. Most of all, the new templates validate in xhtml 1.0 strict doctype (except for some third party remote included code). All in all the new templates and site structure are a major improvement in accessibility and maintainability. Plus, it looks a lot better and loads faster.

I've created a Joomla Readspeaker plugin for the Flevo Hospital in Almere. Readspeaker is a technology that allows webdevelopers to embed a screenreader on a website. Off course many people with a visual handicap already use screenreaders but these usually read everything on the webpage. With readspeaker, the webdeveloper can decide which content should be read, and which shouldn't. Also it's a platform independent solution. If you have a recent webbrowser with javascript enabled it works. Of course I think that creating semantically correct html should be the first and foremost priority for accessible websites. But readspeaker is a nice addition to the web developer's toolbox.