Greater London Action on Disability (GLAD) is an organisation working with charities, government agencies and other organisations to promote disability rights and to provide help and information disability-related topics.
GLAD commissioned Out of the Trees to completely redevelop their existing site, which they found hard to maintain, suffered from poor accessibility and usability, and had a dated design. With over 80 member organisations working in the field of disability, GLAD also wanted add new features to facilitate better communication between itself and its members.
Although GLAD does not provide direct services to the public, a secondary objective for the site was to provide frequently requested information to disabled people and to direct them to appropriate local organisations or agencies.
We worked closely with GLAD to plan the site's information architecture and to detail exactly what new features should be included to meet these objectives and improve their communication and workflow.
The site we created consists of two distinct areas — the public side and a members-only area — with a secure administration area for GLAD to manage the site.
The public area of the site consists of directories of disability-related organisations, fact sheets and links, which can be browsed by topic, London borough or by postcode. Categorised news and articles sections (with RSS syndication) allow GLAD to keep visitors informed about issues affecting disabled people living and working in London. An online ordering system makes it easy for people to purchase GLAD publications and subscriptions.
The public site also provides information for non-member organisations, outlines the benefits of becoming a member of GLAD, and enables online application.
The members-only section of the site allows member organisations to log-in and view restricted-access articles and news items. In order to increase dialogue between member organisations, we implemented a discussion forum, which we adapted to bring it up to an acceptable level of acessibility. The forum allows members to share ideas and resources, helps foster a sense of involvement in GLAD, and gives a voice to smaller member organisations who may not normally attend formal meetings. Members are able to advertise job vacancies, consultancy, training, publications and other services for disabled people.
The entire GLAD site is managed through a password-protected Administration Area, without requiring any specialist technical knowledge. We created a custom Content Management System (CMS) that enables GLAD staff to:
Control over access to the members-only area is taken care of with a custom Membership Management System (MMS), which allows GLAD to approve membership applications from individuals and organisations, delete members, assign different access rights, or edit member details. The MMS includes a forgotten password feature, and allows member organisations to update their contact details.
The MMS also incorporates a mailing list facility, enabling GLAD to send out email newsletters or emails to all members, small groups or individual members. Members can opt-in and opt-out of the mailing list at any time.
With such a large proportion of GLAD's staff and users being disabled, making the site accessible was of key importance. Although we needed to give the site a stronger style and 'identity', we were careful to ensure that this did not compromise accessibility or ease of use. Our design had to take into account the potential barriers faced by users with disabilities, including:
We built the site to meet all Web Accessibility Initiative Priority A and AA guidelines, and the majority of AAA guidelines. We incorporated a feature to enable public visitors, members and administrators to save their accessibility preferences for the site. These preferences included:
At key stages during the development process, and on completion, the site was checked using automated tools and tested by people with a range of disabilities.
Out of the Trees were responsible for all aspects of the GLAD site redevelopment, including project planning, information architecture, visual design, database design and coding.
Now you've seen how we helped Greater London Action on Disability, why not contact us to find out what we can do for you?
