Gifts Hospice Accessible Website

Gifts have a long-standing web presence, so it was Agincourt’s job to bring it upto date, whilst bringing new accessibility standards (WCAG 2.0) to the table.

Design

First of all, a revised logo was produced with improved typography and more modern styling, this served as the basis for the website, as the warm, friendly feeling fed directly from it, it really did enforce how much impact a well designed logo can have on every aspect of design.

We believed the organisation of the layout to be of upmost importance, because the older audience may easily become confused. To ensure proper use of whitespace, we used a 12-column grid system to structure the columns within.

To provide support for the latest technologies, without alienating those on older browsers, we took full advantage of two useful techniques: progressive enhancement and graceful degradation. What these mean is we can build on top of a base standard (e.g. splitting the text into 2 columns on the homepage, isn’t required but it’s nice if supported) or support new technologies and fall back to older ones if the browser doesn’t support them (e.g. the video on the homepage uses HTML5, but falls back to Quicktime and Flash if the browser can’t handle it). Through the use of these techniques allows for everyone to get the best possible experience.

Accessibility

Having an older audience, it is common that the website will receive visitors who are not as able as most people. At Agincourt, we believe the web is something everyone should be able to enjoy, so we catered for these users in a few ways.

The WCAG 2.0 guidelines on accessibility were followed, which meant implementing things such as the breadcrumb along the top of the website to show where the visitor currently is, reasonably high contrast for text to ensure it’s readable and not relying upon colour to convey information (a common problem for those with colour blindness).

We then took this one step further and produced a toggle for a ‘high visibility’ mode (see right), which has much larger text, an inverted colour scheme and reduced visual distraction.

Before going live, the site was checked using a screen reader (text-to-speech tool) to check it can be listened to and navigated easily by those who use said technology.