On 12 November 2019 the Product Action Incorporated website was judged as a finalist in the Australian Access Awards for the ‘Not-for-profit/community website of the year’ category by the Centre for Accessibility.
Winners will be announced at the Awards night being held in Fremantle on Thursday 12 December 2019.
The Product Action Inc website was designed and developed by Flux as part of a broader brand refresh project. It was completed in June 2018 after significant consultation with the Product Action Management and Board. One objective of the project was to develop a website which was considered to be accessible by those who may have a disability or visual impairment.
The Product Action website was therefore designed and built to conform to Level AAA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2 (WCAG 2.0), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The website follows the Australian Government’s mandatory requirements for Australian Government agencies, including:
- Being designed to display on all commonly used Internet browsers
- Being designed to work effectively with accessibility hardware and/or software.
- Accommodating a range of connection speeds, page sizes have been kept to a minimum
- Web pages are scalable to accommodate various common screen resolutions
- Print style sheets are provided to make printed pages clear and free from unnecessary material
- Links are friendly URLs and have meaningful link text which can be read by screen readers
- Images on the site have meaningful alternative ‘alt’ tags which can be read by screen readers
- All navigation on the site is fully accessible without Javascript, Cascading Style Sheets or graphical images. The navigation is accessible to screen readers.
In addition to this we have also included:
- ‘Skip to Links’ are available to navigate through pages and sections on the website
- Keyboard accessible links and navigation menus, drop-down menus are accessible
- Text and backgrounds use sufficient colour contrast to meet AAA requirements
- Semantic HTML headings
- Native HTML for buttons (used for actions) and links (used for navigation)
- Forms use label elements to identify each form input
- No auto-playing carousels are present
- No auto-playing videos are present
- This website includes proper use of headings that can be navigated through depending on the navigation settings of your screen reader.
From an operational point of view the website has also been set up to be used by the Board as a central location for the storage and distribution of corporate documents—meeting minutes, etc.
From a business perspective, the website has also been delivering outstanding search engine rankings, resulting in a significant increase in new enquiries from both new business prospects (packaging clients) and supported employees looking for work.
If your organisation could benefit from an accessible website, please get in touch.
