Easter Seals: Accessibility Redesign
Easter Seals, which has for more than 80 years helped children and adults with disabilities gain greater independence, wished to redesign its site to improve its branding impact, usability, and most importantly, its ability to be accessed by all users including those with disabilities.
Building on a technology plan developed by Beaconfire, Easter Seals staff recognized that their content must be made accessible to users with physical, visual, aural, or cognitive disabilities. An estimated one-fifth of Americans have a disability, and those individuals frequently make use of online services. It was critical that the organization's Web site exceed standard accessibility guidelines to ensure information about Easter Seals' services and resources would be available to everyone.
Easter Seals engaged Beaconfire to evaluate its existing site's level of accessibility, identify relevant accessibility guidelines, create a new more accessible and usable creative design, and develop and launch the new site. Drawing upon its experience with previous accessible solutions, Beaconfire created an Accessibility Evaluation of the existing Easter Seals site to isolate key areas for improvement. The evaluation elicited the accessibility requirements -- both technical and creative -- to be followed during design and development.
These requirements recognized that the new site must accommodate users who may be operating in contexts different from traditional users. For instance, users may have difficulty reading or comprehending text, have a text-only screen, a small screen, or a slow Internet connection. They may even have an early version of a browser, a non-standard browser, or a voice browser.
The Results: The redesigned Easter Seals Web site adheres to guidelines set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), as well as the federal government's "Section 508" guidelines. Usability research drove the implementation of core site features such the site search, skip navigation, and use of Cascading Style Sheets to preserve visitors' ability to customize their own experience to meet their particular needs. Once the site was complete, Beaconfire performed a quality assurance test of the site including evaluation with accessibility evaluation tools and voice browsers, and delivered a report that detailed which accessibility improvements had been taken. In addition, Beaconfire created a Style Guide to assist content authors create future accessible content.
The outcome was a more usable site for all of Easter Seals' visitors.