Accessibility Consulting

How do I get started with accessibility? How do I bring accessibility into my organisation?

These are just a couple of the questions that we’ve been asked by organisations over the many years that we’ve been involved in web accessibility.

Most people understand that accessibility is important and why it makes good business to have a fully accessible website. But for many people it’s a big step into the unknown.

Well that’s where Coolfields Consulting can help you.

Have a look over the accessibility consulting services we offer and see if any of them fit with your business needs.

Accessibility consulting services

Building an accessibility strategy

When accessibility is new to everyone in an organisation it can be daunting to think about where to start.

The business benefits of embracing accessibility can be hard to quantify, but one way to start is to understand how many extra people can benefit from improved accessibility within your organisation’s website. It’s always more than most people think – especially when you factor in the elderly and other groups of people who wouldn’t even consider themselves to have an impairment or disability.

Undoubtedly, bringing accessibility into an organisation needs buy-in from key people within that organisation. We can help with that by running presentations and workshops for managers to highlight the business benefits.

And organisations need to remember that there is a legal requirement to make their websites accessible. There have been legal cases brought under this legislation – most notably BMI Baby vs RNIB which was settled when BMI Baby agreed to make the requested improvements to its website.

Designing user interfaces for accessibility

When designing a new website, or reworking an existing website, it is important to take accessibility into consideration from the beginning of the process. It is unfortunately all to easy for user interface (UI) designers to produce designs that would subsequently be hard (and maybe impossible) to make accessible.

Coolfields Consulting’s accessibility expert Graham Armfield has worked with UI designers at Royal Bank of Scotland and Tesco Compare, amongst others, to ensure optimum accessibility of redesigned websites and web applications.

Accessibility guidance for your developers

Having produced user interface designs that will not compromise accessibility, the next step is to turn those designs into a functioning website or web application. And that’s where your web developers come in.

Producing accessible websites is not hard, it just involves thinking about things in a different way. The underlying HTML markup of a website and any scripting that affects that markup can make or break the accessibility of a website.

We can help your developers get up to speed with coding for accessibility. We can arrange presentations to get across fundamental accessibility techniques, or we can run workshops with groups of developers to work on accessible solutions for specific areas. Your developers may find these workshops useful  to solve issues found during accessibility testing.

Training in accessibility techniques can also be provided for your developers if this would suit you best.

 

Like to hear more?

Give us a call on 01483 856613 or 07905 590026 to have a chat about what would work for your organisation. Alternatively you can use our contact form.