Launching a new website for our community

Welcome to our new website. We hope that you will be inspired by what you find here, moved to get involved, or empowered to access our support.

But, most of all, we hope that you feel welcome and included here.

Why we re-designed our website

Our charity makes technology – specifically audio technology – accessible for people living with sight loss.

Every day blind and partially sighted people tell us about the challenges they face when using computers, phones, and audio devices. Just like the built environment, for someone with sight loss the digital world we habit can be riddled with obstacles, hurdles and barriers.

Even the most tech savvy will every day encounter content online that they cannot access or enjoy. Too often, it simply has not been created with the needs of the millions people sight loss and other disabilities in mind. This thoughtlessness can leave people feeling frustrated, left out, and unable to access the same content and opportunities others might take for granted.

When we launched our transformation strategy last year, we knew we needed to put people living with sight loss at the heart of all our decision making.  And it quickly became clear that our own website required urgent improvement to be meet the needs of that community - the people we exist to serve.

As long as we were not fixing it, we too would be part of the problem.

What accessibility means to us

Our top priority for our new website was to ensure it was user-friendly to someone living with sight loss.

After an extensive search for a digital partner, we found Giant Digital. We knew the team there shared our passion for the project and would bring the technical skills to achieve our goals. Together, we set about defining what accessibility meant to us.

We committed to achieving a key set of criteria set out in the Web Content Accessibilty Guidelines (WCAG) – an international standard for digital accessibility. But we also talked to the real people we support and asked them what they wanted from our new website.

At BWBF, the people who use our services don’t all look the same. We cater to the mum in her thirties who was born with partial sight loss, who’s always on Instagram and loves to get her hands on the latest gadget. But we also cater to the retiree in his 80s who is adjusting to life with sight loss and may not even own a smart phone.

Our website needed to work at both ends of the extreme.

The result is this, a new website with accessibility ‘baked in’ the way it is structured and coded. This means we’ve been able to avoid the hidden traps or pitfalls that can trip up a user with sight loss. At the same time we’ve made use of added features that give people quick and easy control to change font size or view the site in different colour contrast modes. We believe this means that the site should work well for someone who wants to use a screen reader or ‘in-built’ accessibility features in their browser. But it also for people who perhaps aren’t so adept at using their phone or computer’s accessibility features, and just want some quick, easy control.

No two people are the same. We hope our site gives people with different types sight loss, and different digital skill levels, agency over how they want to engage with us online.

How accessible is our site?

We thrilled that, after a thorough and independent audit of the site, our website has been assessed as compliant with WCAG guidance, to level AA. This is an important benchmark and gives us confidence that we’re serving the needs of our community. It also means we are catering to users living with a whole range of other disabilities, something that we felt passionately was important in this project.

But technical guidance can only go so far. The way our real-life users experience our website is what really matters. We hope that people living with sight loss - the tech-savvy, those less digitally literate, and everyone in between – will feel that this is a site for them. We hope that they will be inspired by our life-changing work. Most importantly, we hope those who need us will find it easy to access our support.

We will continue to test the site with real users and learn from their experiences.

Let us know how we are doing

Launching our new website is the beginning, not the end of this journey for us. The success of this project will be measured not today as we launch our new site, but every day in the experience of those who come here.

To be able to offer the most welcoming and inclusive digital experience, we rely on your comments about how you’ve experienced using our site, and your suggestions for how we can do better. If there is anything on this site that you’re struggling to access, or you think we’ve missed something in our testing, please let us know. If you want information from this site in another format, please get in touch.

You can find more information about accessibility and how to share your feedback on our accessibility page. 

Thank you for your support. Together we can create a world that’s better designed and more welcoming for people living with sight loss.