Cahoot
Project type: web accessibility consulting, HTML and CSS coding
Partner: none
Timescale: September 2003 - August 2004
Cahoot was one of the UK's first Internet banks, and their site was built back in the late 1990's; as a result of its age, it had some accessibility issues and was long overdue for an overhaul. In 2003, the web design team at Cahoot asked us to work with them on a major IT project to overhaul their web sites and implement significantly better web accessibility.
The visual design was contracted to an external agency and then adapted in-house by the Cahoot designers with input from us.
We were delighted to accept, and worked closely with teams throughout the business for nearly a year; the project was a success and Cahoot relaunched with a new identity, cleaner design and much better accessibility in August 2004.
Our involvement included:
- Training and seminars for various groups within the business
- Web accessibility consultancy and design
- Accessibility audits
- Writing documentation and procedures for the new site
- Developing an SQA program for the design team
- HTML and CSS coding
Since the accessibility redesign was only one of many ongoing IT projects at the bank, there were restrictions on the scope and scale of changes that could be made. A total rewrite of the code was out, as was anything that required changing the programming side of things; such restrictions limited how far we could take accessibility, as with any retrofit. Working within these restrictions was challenging and brought an extra dimension to the project for us.
The accessibility redesign covered the marketing site above, the enrolment site, where customers sign up and customise their productss, and the actual banking site itself. One of the areas we improved most was that of forms - these are particularly difficult for screen reader users to work with, and we made phenomenal improvements here. The issue of good forms support is not one that is widely known even in accessibility circles; we're very pleased to have been able to really explore the boundaries of forms design on this project.
For some large companies, accessibility means little more than a link at the bottom of the home page telling people how to resize their fonts in Internet Explorer. Cahoot were very much of a different stamp; they took accessibility and supporting the needs of disabled visitors extremely seriously, and were willing to invest significant effort in training people and in changing their culture where necessary to ensure that this was not just a one-off exercise, but a true, long-term commitment to better working practices.
