Sight Concern Bedfordshire get a Christmas number one
Sight Concern Bedfordshire logo
Sight loss charities understand that accessibility isn’t optional – it’s essential.
At Sight Concern Bedfordshire, we had long recognized the need to improve our website, but it kept slipping down our to-do list. This all changed when we were connected to the Developer Society through Digital Candle (a great resource if you haven’t used it yet!). Sight Concern Bedfordshire and the Developer Society had a shared objective: to create the UK’s most accessible charity website with a small team on a low budget. The sight loss community relies on a variety of assistive technologies and text-to-speech tools, we wanted our site to function seamlessly with all of them. The Developer Society quickly provided a new site and are continuing to support us with insights and guidance.
Sight Concern Bedfordshire team and service users holding sticks with glasses, santa beard, santa hats and the words “ho, ho, ho,” There is a decorated christmas tree on the left hand side. The Sight Concern Bedfordshire logo is at the top.
And here’s the best part: we hit the number one spot on UK Charity accessible website rankings! (Joseph Rowntree came in second followed by Blind Veterans UK and RNIB). Here are the rankings for top 3 websites for accessibility – Silktide Index. This collaboration has also sparked ongoing improvements.
One of our visually impaired team members"It's great with screen readers,.... but now that I have better access, I can say the content needs updating!"
We’re now co-producing improved, more engaging content to ensure our website better meets the needs of our community. If you’re considering a website update, or just want to chat about digital accessibility, feel free to reach out – we can share what we are learning!
Stephen Hawkes, The Developer Society“Sight Concern already had a website, and we used that as a basis for offering an alternative website. Our process was to radically reverse the process, starting with the screen-reader experience and working backward toward users without visual impairment. This not only helped to leap to good accessibility results, but also naturally distills down the content effort."
“As a not-for-profit ourselves, we’re keen to re-use the work we have done elsewhere and advance the access and quality of technology that the third sector can make use of. That’s basically what open-source should be. We want to make this something other organisations could use, especially small charities, so designated it to be highly replicable and adaptable and we could rebuild something similar for a small charity for around £5,000 to £9,000."
You can also read the article Small sight loss charity’s website rated most accessible in UK sector – Civil Society.
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