Feature: Why Birmingham Focus on Blindness scooped a BIMA

The purpose of the Birmingham Focus on Blindness site was to highlight the work of this Birmingham based charity in an accessible way to enable people with sight impairment to find out information about the services offered on their behalf. The site was originally intended to conform with Bobby and W3C
Level AA accessibility and have a method of allowing the Birmingham
Focus staff to update the site themselves.

The site was developed initially using standard Adobe and Macromedia development tools to create the basic site structure with a MySQL database running behind the scenes to serve the dynamic page content. Throughout the development we stuck rigidly to the W3C accessibility guidelines, with our aim to exceed the brief in all areas and in so doing push the envelope of online accessible design.

To ensure that the site met with the highest possible W3C Level AAA standards throughout, we handcoded amendments to most of the HTML, double checking this with online code verification engines. We then exhaustively tested the site to ensure maximum compliance with access technology such as screen readers and braille monitors, before the third stage of our accessibility testing which was carried out by Birmingham Focus volunteers and also the disabled client group of the Self Direction Community Project whom we regularly work with for peer appraisal, which is the key to true accessibility.

It is only by obtaining feedback from the people for whom a site has been developed that true accessibility can be achieved.

The site has many innovative features, most of which are not new but have certainly not been done in such an effective manner before and rarely within the same site. The display can be fully customisable - easily enabling a choice of text and background colours, and a choice of various font sizes and types. A login area exists that will memorise the settings of the user and display all pages in that way, and also feed content to the user that is most appropriate to them - this is a highly dynamic form of implicit personalisation. News relevant to the site user can be highlighted, site searches will display more relevant results based on the user profile before any other results are listed, and all content is set with attributes to ensure that the site is a truly personalised experienced.

The content management system behind the scenes is second to none and is possibly the only website content management product developed today to be fully accessible to Level AAA standards. In layman's terms, this means that not only can the website be browsed by someone who is completely blind, but that a blind person can have full control over the entire site and is capable of not just adding and removing content, but can also upload files, images, amend navigation links, remove and add pages and site sections, change links, and update the entire site to their liking. This is what web accessibility is all about - making the internet accessible to everyone regardless of their ability or disability levels.

The Way Ahead...

We seized the chance to work on this project as another opportunity of demonstrating our skills and abilities in the field of online accessibility. Rather than just talk about it, we actually put our words into practice as, by raising the bar, we have shown that the combination of design, advanced functionality and true accessibility is not only possible, but should be the way ahead for the internet. If more people took accessibility as seriously as we do, the Internet would be a much better place for everyone.

E-quality is not just an offline word.

Jeremy Hurst
Business Director
Slightly Different

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