Inclusive Practices Africa

Third year information systems students Edwin Ndaba, Maryam Seboa, Kimberley Mugadza and Nikhil Maharajh, comprising Team 6 built a new website for the Inclusive Practices Africa unit in the Department of Health and Rehab of UCT. Our site provides business value by encouraging and helping users to donate to IPA on the UCT portal, facilitating a platform for users to engage with IPA and each other on disability inclusion and creating a platform for donors, community members and partner organizations to access information on both IPA’s work and on inclusive practices for the people with disabilities. The site aimed to facilitate four things:
• Provide community engagement: allowing community members and the IPA team to interact in a virtual Chatroom or message board. We integrated Tapatalk into our website and allowed users to comment on articles.
• Enable IPA to share information: We created several pages on which the Admin team can share information such as articles, publications, alumni and projects of the unit.
• Give the IPA team front-end control of the website: the IPA team is now able to edit, delete and delete users, articles, publications, alumni, projects, view usage reports and assign roles to users. Through an admin panel accessed via an encrypted log in feature that requires email verification for new accounts, designated users can access the admin control panel.
• Make the website accessible to the disabled: we integrated a screen reader (text-to-speech) which narrates page text and image alt text, speech-to-text which allows the user to speak into their browser and the browser transcribes what they are saying into a message box, as well video tutorials with subtitles, paging, sorting and filtering, and parallax scrolling.
We would like to thank our sponsor, Prof Harsha Kathard for this project, Assoc Prof Adheesh Budree for his guidance and support, Prof Elsje Scott and Dr Walter Uys for their supervision, and the broader IPA, Department of Development and Alumni, Volt Africa and third year IS support team which included mentors, lecturers and university staff, as well as the end users who included people with disabilities who allowed us to interview them and offered useful criticism and encouragement.