Project Details: Development of Financial Statement Management System – Rossmoor Walnut Creek (Rossmoor.com)
About Rossmoor Walnut Creek
Rossmoor is an award-winning community situated in Northern California’s beautiful community of Walnut Creek, Rossmoor offers a variety of home ownership options at a range of prices in an ideal environment for active adults 55 years of age or older.
Objective: Rossmoor’s CFO wanted to post financial information of all Mutuals on the website. Also, It should be easy to manage and organize. Also, the document uploads should not increase the server load as it will impact the website’s performance.
Project Requirement: A system to upload financial statements for each mutual, upload data under each mutual, ability to classify it under different heads, create users and grant access as needed. User Roles
Financial Statement Manager: Manager can upload financial statements under each head and assign access to mutual users as needed.
Mutual User: User should be able to view the documents assigned by the mutual manager.
Web Admin: This user has access to everything except Financial Statements.
Challenges: When we started the project It seemed simple but after each accomplishment, we figured out new use cases that needed to be addressed. So we had to improve the project after each milestone consistently. Create a new dashboard for mutual users resembling the current website. Each user should be able to login and view financial statements of his own mutual.
Our Strategy: We wanted to build a cost-effective solution so we divided the whole project in different phases and carved out modules and then, in the end, we integrated everything.
Document Module – Rossmoor Walnut Creek (Rossmoor.com)
We developed the document module using the custom post types plugin. We were able to custom code the backend in such a way that the uploaded financial statements can be classified/grouped under different heads in one click. After we achieved this we worked on the interface designing for document management.
User Module- Rossmoor Walnut Creek (Rossmoor.com)
We faced multiple issues in assigning roles while working on the user module. But we used filters in wordpress to assign and restrict user capabilities. At the same time we were able to make it easier for the financial statement manager to assign the needed access.
Screenshot: Financial Statement Dashboard
Making the website ADA Compliant – Rossmoor Walnut Creek (Rossmoor.com)
Objective: The primary objective of this project is to ensure that the Rossmoor website is made accessible to all including people with disabilities including low vision, blindness, hearing loss, limited movement, etc. The end goal is to ensure that everyone gets a fair and equal opportunity to browse the website and understand all web pages and elements on their own without making a lot of effort.
Project Requirement: The Web is an increasingly important resource in many aspects of life: education, employment, government, commerce, health care, recreation, and more. It is essential that the Web be accessible in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with diverse abilities. Access to information and communications technologies, including the Web, is defined as a basic human right in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
The website (https://rossmoor.com/) was fully functional with the required features however most of the elements were not configured to be navigated or understood by people with disabilities. Example: some elements have low contrast text or color and some images need description (alt text) so people who cannot see can understand the image using text to speech readers. Very fortunately we have the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) who created guidelines on the changes. The organisation has defined and published a set of rules that explain how to make websites more accessible to people with disabilities. One more requirement was making sure that we also have a supporting widget on the website which helps us navigate the website. Accessibility widgets offer a wide variety of features like Keyboard Navigation Motor, Text Magnifier being just a few options.
Challenges – Rossmoor Walnut Creek (Rossmoor.com)
The primary challenge was to ensure that the website is accessibility compliant however no feature of the website is compromised because of the code changes. Certain code changes do not go well with the website affecting the page or functionality making it difficult to implement the changes. Finding the right tool to help us understand the needed ADA improvements is also a worthy obstacle. There are many tools and services that scan the website to highlight the needed code changes, task is to find the one that highlights all necessary and important changes.
Our Strategy: Ensuring all website pages are scanned thoroughly and made accessibility compliant. Making sure that all website images have alt image attributes enabling them to have an understandable description. This is just one aspect of the many changes that a regular ADA non-compliant needs attention. Making sure that we install a fully featured Accessibility widget that provides all options to variety of users accessing the website. Making the website code fully ADA compliant and adding a widget to support is a great success.
Our Approach: Inspecting the code page by page with the help of available tools and enlisting all errors that need changes. Solving all listed errors with proper research is a must to make sure we achieve the needs.
Screenshots
Homepage with different color adjustments – (Dark Contrast and Monochrome)
Text Magnifier & High Contrast BackgroundClient Review – Ann Peterson, Director of Communications
Sandeepa and the KHA Creation team are like a dream team of web developers. Not only do they promptly answer our “emergency” calls, they deliver on all of our requests in a timely manner. They have the expertise to handle big and small projects – even specialized requests for custom work. Earlier this year, they helped bring our website into ADA compliance, which has been a blessing for our senior community, where we have many low-vision residents. They are also extremely affordable and communicate well if something looks as if it will exceed an estimate. I highly recommend them.