Accessibility services
Our accessibility services ensure your site reaches the widest possible audience. Our experienced team can:
- Test your site manually across numerous technologies and/or test them with disabled users.
- Take the guesswork out of the accessibility guidelines and compliancy standards (WCAG, RNIB).
- Help you create a universally accessible website that can be accessed by assistive or new technologies, like screen readers or PDAs.
Accessibility Benefits
An accessible website makes sense for your business commercially, legally and ethically.
Commercially: Can your business risk excluding the 8.5 million disabled people in Britain or the growing number of users browsing the web with new technologies? Making your website universally accessible to more users means exposing your organisation to more customers.
Ethical: The original vision of the web was its ‘universality’. Showing that you embrace this philosophy by ensuring your website is accessible to a wide audience demonstrates an inclusive and ethical approach to your customers.
Legal: “It is unlawful for a provider of services to discriminate against a disabled person” according to the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). A website is a service to all users, whatever its purpose. It is the duty of all service providers to ensure, as far as possible, that their online service complies with the DDA.
Accessibility audits
User Vision can perform a comprehensive audit of your website, advise you on achieving a recognised compliancy standard and test your site with disabled users. You will be provided with a straightforward, detailed report on the site’s accessibility and what measures are required for improvements.
Accessibility experts from User Vision will evaluate your site through a series of automated and manual tests to determine problems that disabled users may face in accessing the site. These procedures include running your site through an automated accessibility checker, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Our consultants will examine the site with a range of different browsers and platforms, including screen readers, text only browsers and standard browsers with adjusted settings. The code will be manually checked to determine how issues arise and what can be done to resolve them.
If you are trying to achieve a recognised accessibility standard we can tailor our report to your needs. We can evaluate sites against the full set of W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and specific levels of compliance, such as those required for the ‘See it Right’ qualification from the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB).
User Vision are also proud to partner with Segala in providing an innovative new accessibility certification which will raise the bar in accessible website design. The certification places a digital certificate on your site which shows you have had an independent accessibility review to certify your site achieves a particular level in accessibility. In certain browsers, such as Firefox, people will be able to filter on accessible sites and searches will only return sites that meet that requirement (where set), thus giving a compelling reason to ensure your site is not only usable but accessible also. User Vision are the first user experience consultancy to have achieved this certification.
Accessibility testing
We also conduct usability tests with disabled users to gather empirical evidence of the accessibility of the site. Through contacts in our community we have a database of disabled users who will give their time to use your site and feedback their experience. Observing these tests is a powerful reminder for you or your colleagues why you should be striving to make your site accessible.
Frequently our accessibility audits are integrated with User Experience Evaluations and Usability Testing. Clients who have benefited from this service include Amnesty International, Economist.com, Ikea, Royal Bank of Scotland, Tesco Personal Finance and Scottish Enterprise. Our case study for Britannia Building Society shows how creating an accessible site has improved the user experience for all users.
User Vision consultants regularly run accessibility training courses . Keep an eye on our events section to see when we are running our next public course or contact us for more information about tailoring a training course for you.