Australian Taxation Office
14th March 2005 - 20th July 2006
Task Summary
- Visual Design
- Information Design
- Copy Editing
- Writing of HTML and CSS code
- High and Low fidelity screen design
- Development of accessibility features for the project
Project Details
In March 2005, I moved to Canberra for a six month contract on the ATO Change Program, a joint venture between the Australian Tax Office, and Accenture Australia, to overhaul the ATO’s internal systems and consolidate them into a more streamlined system.
As part of a five member UI team, I played a role in the development of the customer facing screens, for both internal and external consumption. This initially began with the development of the visual designs for the project, which were refined over several months to include contributions from most members of the team.
As these template designs began to stabilise, I commenced prototyping the HTML/CSS templates that would eventually be adapted to the .Net framework that would drive the site. As I developed the site templates, the team leader and myself liaised closely with the disability services department within the ATO, to ensure the templates we were developing would meet their requirements for accessibility.
The browsers requiring support were the current release -1, which at the time we were developing the templates included Netscape 6 on Mac OS, and IE5.x on Windows. I worked closely with a .Net developer, to build up a library of controls that would meet the requirements for accessibility, provide access to CSS declarations, as well as enable deployment of multiple skins for the different channels available on the ATO website.
By the time I rolled off the project, fourteen months after I started, I had developed a solid library of CSS, which was flexible enough to withstand almost any implementation likely to be thrown at it, as well as a number of page schematics and standards documents that would enable ongoing development and maintenance.
The pages used for testing the CSS can be viewed here: