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Web Accessibility services | Nomensa
Web Accessibility Services

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Web Accessibility Services

More than one in five people in the UK have a disability, so it's essential that your digital estates are fully accessible.

You may not be aware of the barriers users face when interacting with your digital products. You will, however, notice them in your bottom line or when a legal issue arises.

What is web accessibility?

Accessible design places every human, regardless of physical ability or impairment, at the centre of every product, device and service. Beyond the context of legal compliance, maintaining an accessible digital estate is integral to providing great user experiences.

Digital accessibility is measured against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These are written by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). We are members of W3C, while our co-founder and head of accessibility, Alastair Campbell, is both a co-chair and key writer of the guidelines.

Recent UK government legislation states all public sector websites and apps must be accessible and feature an accessibility statement. Take our Accessibility Assessment to see how accessible your organisation is.

Why is digital accessibility important?

Investing in accessibility opens up your service to a diverse cross-section of users you may otherwise lockout. You may not be aware that 22% of the UK population have some kind of disability. That’s 13.9 million people you are potentially blocking from accessing, using and buying your products and services. According to government research:

  • 2.4 million people in the UK have a manual dexterity issue and use their keyboards for navigation
  • Over 2 million people in the UK live with sight loss and need to use a screenreader
  • 1.5 million people in the UK have a learning difficulty and need alternative formats to understand content
  • 19% of the UK population have hearing loss, including 6.5 million over 60 years of age, and rely on captions for audio content
  • 10% of the UK population are dyslexic and would benefit from simple writing styles and formats
  • 8% of men and 0.5% of women are colour blind and may not be able to read fonts with certain colour contrasts

Your website will not meet their accessibility needs by chance. You must take active steps to bring your skills, activities and outputs up to the required levels. Fixing these accessibility issues early in a project is up to 40 times cheaper than fixing them after launch.

Good web design champions accessibility from the very first line of coding. It is inclusive, progressive and ensures all user needs are met across every touch-point. But most importantly, it sends a strong signal to your sector that you truly care about the people that interact with your organisation.

How do you start improving accessibility?

The best way to take action is to figure out where you currently stand, and this begins with accessibility testing. We provide manual audits, automated testing and usability testing against the WCAG guidelines for our clients. While we recommend adopting an approach of regular and systematic testing, our team can quickly evaluate your digital product or service at any point in a project.

Accessibility testing

Accessibility testing gives us the foundation we need to understand and advise on your organisation’s needs, capabilities and current offering. Although we recommend that accessibility is incorporated as early as possible, we test throughout a project’s lifecycle.

Accessibility testing helps us to understand barriers some customers face when navigating your website or app. It also helps optimise concepts and prototypes before costly errors occur, ultimately improving the overall quality and robustness of a product. ‘Testing’ is an umbrella term for a range of tactics. These include:

  • Automated testing – a software or web-based tool will systematically test your entire site, quickly identifying technical problems and providing the groundwork for a manual audit
  • Manual audits – one of our accessibility experts will interrogate your site against all 50 of WCAG 2.1’s success criteria (at level AA), delivering a comprehensive view of your site’s current offering
  • Usability testing – we ask participants with hearing, sight, mobility or cognitive impairments to move through your digital product or service, completing key tasks and journeys

Our accessibility testing services can be treated as one-off audits or a full programme of work designed to improve your product or service. When the three types of testing are applied in conjunction, a holistic view of a service or product is revealed.

Accessibility training

Our training sessions and workshops empower your teams to take ownership of the accessibility issues facing more than a fifth of the UK population.

Whether hosted for stakeholders, board members or practitioners, these face-to-face or remote sessions are tremendously helpful in bringing everyone along on your journey and supporting organisational change.

As barriers mostly arise in design and development, it is essential that these teams have the necessary skills and expertise to build with accessibility in mind. Our research has found that fixing accessibility issues early in a project is considerably cheaper than fixing them after launch.

We understand that different departments or job roles have specific concerns – for instance, a UX practitioner will be more concerned with design than a developer, who in turn will be more preoccupied with code solutions. So, we always tailor our advice to whoever is asking and deliver in the most actionable and usable format possible. Training helps generate an internal culture that really champions accessibility long after a project ends.

How do you start improving accessibility?

The best way to take action is to figure out where you currently stand, and this begins with accessibility testing. We provide manual audits, automated testing and usability testing against the WCAG guidelines for our clients. While we recommend adopting an approach of regular and systematic testing, our team can quickly evaluate your digital product or service at any point in a project.

Here at Nomensa, we go beyond providing a comprehensive assessment of your current offering through audits and automatic testing. Our three-pronged approach of testing, training and consultancy uniquely places us to deliver bespoke strategies. Our accessibility services have been perfected over the course of hundreds of successful accessibility engagements and are best delivered as a programme of work.

Good web design champions accessibility from the very first line of coding. It is inclusive, progressive and ensures all user needs are met across every touch-point. But most importantly, it sends a strong signal to your sector that you truly care about the people that interact with your organisation.

We'd love to hear from you

We drive commercial value for our clients by creating experiences that engage and delight the people they touch.

Email us:
hello@nomensa.com

Call us:
+44 (0) 117 929 7333

Nomensa.com

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