WCAG accessibility may not be the most glamorous of subject matters for businesses to address, but we can’t stress enough just how important it is for your reputation (not to mention your Google ranking). With the recent release of the WCAG’s newest set of guidelines, Bristol Water saw this as a perfect opportunity to turn their attention to improving their accessibility offering and elevate their WCAG compliancy to 2.1 AA levels.
For the uninitiated, WCAG 2.1 AA compliancy is the gold standard by which websites are measured. The web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever the software, language, or ability so when websites are inconsiderately designed or inconsistently built, they can create barriers that exclude different users from using the product. For a business-like Bristol Water, ensuring their website works for everyone is not only a monumental undertaking but also a non-negotiable.
The project spanned several months and included a full technical and content accessibility audit, UX mapping, content rewrite (by humans, no AI) and redesign of the website sitemap and pages. We also worked alongside Siteimprove, the accessibility monitoring platform, to ensure that Bristol Water had the correct infrastructure to ensure that they were able to be consistent with their accessibility efforts even after the project was complete.
Finally, we created a set of full digital brand guidelines to ensure the Bristol Water team has a complete toolbox to keep their website evergreen and continue consistently hitting those all-important WCAG accessibility standards.
We worked closely with the large team at Bristol Water to lead and manage the project from audit through to launch using tried-and-tested project management tools to make sure the multiple stakeholders were informed, engaged and fully briefed throughout every step of this project.