Accessibility Standards
Ethics Matter
How annoying is it when you visit a website and it just doesn’t work properly? A broken image, a button that doesn’t click, or it has a bad User Interface design and you can’t easily see where to go next?
You just click off and go to another website that was in your search list yeah?
For many people living with different levels of abilities there are even more elements that need considering for your website to give them a good experience. A website that can be used, with confidence and not one that is turned away from to go and look for another website that just ‘works’.
Here are just a few facts regarding individuals dealing with different levels of abilities in their everyday lives. These are by no means anywhere near a full list of ability considerations that need to be accounted for when creating your digital assets, though they should give you a good idea of how many people perhaps struggle to use your website.
“There are 14.1 million disabled people in the UK”
“In Britain there are approximately 3 million colour blind people (about 4.5% of the entire population)”
“Almost 2 Million people in the UK are blind”
“On a global scale, between 5-10% of the population are suffering from dyslexia, but it could go as high as 17%”
Making your website more inclusive
Here at Bnode we have created the ‘accessibility menu’.
A concept to work with our WordPress website builds that will grow over time to include more and more considerations for website usability, implementing inclusivity and a strong ethical statement when it comes to website accessibility standards.
Give it a go and click on the person to the left on a desktop, or top right on a mobile.
You can always click it again to put it away.
First there is Font
Simply select the font size you would like to change the font to, from Small, Medium, or Large. You can also change the whole website to a more Dyslexic friendly font with a heavier weight at the bottom. There are also several sizes of Letter spacing and Line height that you can choose from to suit your needs.
Second there is Colour
Here you can change the Background Colour, Font Colour and Button Colour of the whole website. The numbers for this list simulate a button colour change too. We have also added a ‘Dark Mode’ for people that prefer less brightness when reading a website.
Third there is Reading
Toggle the switch on and off to have a crosshair follow your mouse on desktop, or on mobile, tap anywhere on the page and scroll up and down. Ideal for Dyslexic users to keep track of where they are reading. We also have an image toggle so you can have less distractions on the page when digesting large amounts of text. Thirdly, we have a ‘ruler’ function that highlights just a few rows & dims the rest of the screen so you can focus on the area that you’re reading. And finally, we have a ‘Text to speech’ function that enables an audio output for page content, thus reducing the requirement for expensive and code heavy browser-based page readers.
Coming Soon
We currently have additional projects in development too. This is part of the ever-growing inbuilt accessibility widget that Bnode is investing in for a more inclusive web-based world.
Accessibility Statement
We want everyone who visits the B Node website to feel welcome and find the experience rewarding.
What are we doing?
To help us make the B Node website a positive place for everyone, we’ve been using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. These guidelines explain how to make web content more accessible for people with different levels of abilities, and user friendly for everyone.
The guidelines have three levels of accessibility (A, AA and AAA). We’ve chosen Level AA as the target for the B Node website to begin with and will be striving to achieve AAA standard wherever possible.
How are we doing?
We’ve worked hard on the B Node website and believe we’ve achieved our goal of Level AA accessibility. We monitor the website regularly to maintain this, but if you do find any problems, please get in touch.
Let us know what you think
If you enjoyed using the B Node website, or if you had trouble with any part of it, please get in touch. We’d like to hear from you in any of the following ways:
Email us at chris@bnode.co.uk
We will be auditing the Bnode website again in December 2024 due to several updates over the past few months to enhance our accessibility tool and user experience. Thanks