Action for Blind People

www.actionforblindpeople.org.uk

We are proud to have produced a brand new and highly accessible site for Action for Blind People, a major UK charity for the visually impaired.

The old site was tired and had lost connection with the charity's brand. Our task was to adapt this new brand for the web. The result is bright and colourful and very much in keeping with the offline look and feel of the organisation.

We spent much of the analysis and design time of this project looking at the needs of site visitors and visualising visitor journeys. This lead to a major overhaul of the navigation, the introduction of landing pages (for significant sections) and the development of the new help directory.

Of couse accessibility was key to the design and was not simply an afterthought. We have provided a number of different ways of viewing the site including high contrast, monochrome and text size variations. These are accessed through a tabbed column on every page.

These designs have been developed in close collaboration with partially sighted web users and blind surfers who use the site via a speech interface. We held regular user testing sessions and fed back their comments into both the design and the navigation. The aim was to go well beyond compliance to create a site that would be genuinely useful to the charity's audiences.

Over the next year we expect to work with Action on new fundraising parts of the site with the aim to have the site as a major component of the charity's business and communications strategies.