Building a Powerful & Accessible Website for Acis Group

Public sector bodies including charity organisations, must by law adhere to accessibility requirements, since people may not have a choice when using a public sector website or app. To meet all the accessibility requirements, our team implemented a number of practices within the design and development processes, including using colours that are accessible to those with visual impairments and ensuring the site is compatible with text-to-speech readers.

Although this requirement doesn’t currently extend to private companies, the principles of the accessibility regulation make it a good policy for all websites to follow and this requirement is expected to become mandatory for all websites in the near future.

For a charity that provides over 7,000 homes for residents across the East Midlands, Yorkshire, and the Humber, the Acis website needed to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1 AA). So the challenge for our web design team was to build a comprehensive resource that was easy to use for the full range of Acis customers, including users with impairments to their vision, hearing, mobility, and thinking and understanding.

The new Acis website needed to incorporate three existing separate sites and create a portal for Housing Developments. The brief included a need for e-commerce capability, lead generation tools and a chatbot, and optimising site speed was a fundamental priority, giving users a seamless experience and simple, easy interaction with content.

Acis Group is a charity that prides itself on the motto of “going beyond bricks and mortar” to create opportunities for people to lead better lives. The group also offers a variety of other associated services, including certified training programs designed to help candidates to pick up new skills and qualifications, as well as providing a home adaptations service to help people enhance their independence.

Large organisations that don’t currently have the requirement to improve accessibility are already finding that it is in their own best interests, and that of their clients, to do so. There is also an overlap with discrimination policies for companies that have a careers section on their web site; they need to make sure their hiring policies are fair and equal, and the website has to reflect that too.