Designing and building an accessible website: the process
Here's how at Legal & General we rose to the challenge of creating a site truly tailored to the needs of all our customers...
With the introduction of new laws promoting greater awareness of disabled web users we, at Legal & General, recognised a golden opportunity. Rather than simply do the bare minimum to comply with legislation we decided to transform the online customer experience we offer.
When we looked at our existing site we saw that, although it compared well with competitors, it presented a number of problems that got in the way of people's online experience. The site was:
- hard to maintain
- full of unhelpful insurance jargon
- often inaccessible for people using handheld devices such as Blackberries or mobile phones
- hard for search engines to index
- scattered with PDFs and JavaScript items that didn't easily convert into new formats
- often inaccessible to people using less common web browsers
- using unwieldy and outdated page code that was slow to load and difficult to maintain.
Not only was the site difficult for people with disabilities to access, the same problems that faced them also made using the site difficult for other users.
Transforming the site
We decided to create a totally redesigned and restructured site, tailored to work for people with different browsers, devices and disabilities.
We rebuilt the our site using clearer language, simpler code and all the features needed to make it truly accessible, not just to people with disabilities, but also to people using handheld devices, less common web browsers - and to the indexing scripts used by internet search engines such as Google.
Features of our rebuilt site include:
- access keys to get users to the right products faster
- content stripped of jargon and rewritten in plain English
- fully accessible with screen readers
- faster loading time
- a design that is easier on the eye allowing users to pick out important content more easily
- fully compatible with all browsers
Our site complies with all the priority one and two checkpoints of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines - criteria that websites need to meet in order to be accessible - and we've also included as many priority three checkpoints as possible.
Getting it right
Right from the start we wanted people with disabilities to be involved in shaping the website's design and applications. We tested our prototypes with potential users and benefited enormously from the input of the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) and The Shaw Trust, who reviewed our work through its development.
Our dedication to accessibility has already been given an important seal of approval: we've won a Shaw Trust accreditation and we're now in the process of securing the RNIB 'See it Right and AbilityNet UseAbility' accreditations.
And we want to continue to make Legal & General more accessible, which is why we are already looking to transform our other websites too...
