Accessible packaging services with heart
Product Action Incorporated
In 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.
Brief
Product Action is an Australian Disability Enterprise and employs people with intellectual disabilities. They provide support, mentoring and training for their employees, who in turn provide high quality packaging services to commercial clients. We were thrilled to be given the opportunity to work with Product Action on a new website and branding refresh, to help them attract employees and customers alike.
Research
We began with the branding refresh—click here to read all about our design process and strategy.
The main objective for the website was to ensure it was accessible by those who may have a disability or visual impairment. It needed to conform to Level AAA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2 (WCAG 2.0), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
We discovered that many other disability service providers use blues and greens in their branding. By sticking with and refreshing the existing purple and green palette, we realised we could reference Product Action’s existing colour palette, as well as connect closely with the NDIS. We also needed to consider the contrast ratio of the colours to ensure that they meet the requirements of an accessible website. To achieve this, the contrast ratio must be 7.1 or higher—the new Product Action primary colour palette contrast ratio is 9.6.
Solution
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.
