Digital Accessibility

Making your website and digital products accessible to people with disabilities can improve the user experience for all users as well as meeting your obligations under the Equality Act.

We can provide practical, cost-effective advice at all stages of the design cycle including:

• Accessibility audits to measure how accessible your website is now and identiify key areas for improvement.
• Accessibility guidelines customised to meet the needs of your organisation.
• User research involving disabled users at any stage of the design process.
• Accessibility testing using our extensive network of disabled users and a range of assistive technology.  We often integrate this with usability testing to reduce costs.
• Accessibility training to help you integrate accessibility into your corporate culture.

Benefits

• Meet your legal obligations under the Equality Act.
• Improve the user experience for users of all abilities.
• Win and keep business from people with disabilities.
• Improve loyalty, customer profile and corporate image to both able and disabled people.
• User testing with disabled users provides compelling evidence of any accessibility issues.
• Identify issues early, before modifications become expensive.

Our Approach

• Based on industry best practice and international usability standards - which we helped develop.
• Flexible solutions tailored to the needs of your organisation.
• Focused on user and task profiles reflecting main disability areas - agreed with you in advance.
• Structured accessibility checklists to identify key issues and allow comparison of results.
• Experienced assessors - familiar with a range of disabilities, assistive technologies, products and systems.
• Our own panel of users with a range disabilities for accessibility testing.
• Clear and straightforward recommendations presented in an easy to use format.
• Practical results which produce immediate improvements.
• Continuous improvement - we will continue to work with you to improve your designs and build accessibility into your culture.

Typical Projects

• Research and testing with profoundly disabled children for the CBeebies Something Special website
• An accessibility review of banking website under development to check for major issues prior to internal accessibility guidelines being approved company wide.
• Working on the re-design of the BBC Ouch! website for people with disabilities
• A research project for BBCi including reviewing and testing websites and interviewing experts and users. BBCi have subsequently won an award for accessible design.
• Providing full-time on-site accessibility and usability resource to Transport Direct
• Other clients for our accessibility reviews include:
  • Abbey
  • TNT
  • Cahoot

What do our clients say?

System Concepts tested our new website with 19 users from their panel of disabled people. The results were extremely valuable in quickly identifying problem areas, and the team were able to suggest practical solutions. It demonstrated to me that accessibility guidelines alone are not enough, there is no substitute for testing with real users, and System Concepts have the skills and expertise to do it successfully.

Shane Snow, Transport Direct

Useful links 

You will find information on improving the physical accessibility of buildings or working environments on the Accessibility Audits and Disability Management section of our website.

For more information on any of our services, please contact us