• The BBC website
• The Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) website
• The official JK Rowling website
• The Glenbow Museum
• Prisoner 4099

The BBC Website

One of the world’s largest websites, the BBC site has accessibility as a core design principal. Although some recent developments such as iPlayer are controversial, the BBC in general takes enormous care to ensure the site works well across a range of platforms and with most AT.

The RNIB Website

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the RNIB’s extensive Xpedio backed website is a model of accessibility and usability providing excellent support for screenreaders and most AT across all common browsers and platforms.

The Official JK Rowling Site

The JK Rowling site is much celebrated for it’s accessibility enabled Flash content which parallels the main site accurately. Further fallback content is available in the form of a text-only rendering which is always kept both faithful and current.

The Glenbow Museum

The Glenbow Museum site was developed using Macromedia Studio and maintained largely via Contribute. The site achieves WCAG AA conformance throughout and is frequently held up by Adobe as an example of how their tools can facilitate accessible content management, design and development.

Prisoner 4099

Prisoner 4099 is the winner of 2007 Jodi Awards for Web Accessibility. A number of young people with visual impairments worked with National Archives to produce the site, accessible archive material and a radio play based on the experiences of a Victorian young offender.

Mencap

Mencap is the UK’s largest ID charity and a prominent lobbyist and service provider for people with ID. Their general audience site provides some accessibility features targeting ID visitors, including server-side text-to-speech audio via ReadSpeaker.

Learning Disability Coalition

Learning Disability Coalitionis the homepage of a coalition of UK campaigning group for people with ID. The site is for general audience but includes additional accessibility enhancements for ID users. Notable inclusions are server-side text-to-speech, via ReadSpeaker, and an animated, talking help avatar, via SitePal. An easy read text as an Adobe Acrobat download is also provided and this includes simplified text supported by accessible concept images from Photo Symbols. Adobe’s inclusion of easy to use text-to-speech functionality in Acrobat Reader has added greatly to the accessibility of such documents for non-readers.

Peepo

Peepo is a long established picture directory for people with ID. Text and sound are sometimes used to support the primary content which is pictorial (SVG images).

Newham Easy Read

This site is a transition portal linking to numerous mini-sites created by people with ID. Sites are built using a serious of simple forms which allow easy upload of audio, video, images and text. Some users record and upload their own audio versions of the text, though the server converts text to mp3 audio where no user audio is provided.

Common Knowledge Glasgow

Common Knowledge is a social networking site developed for and around a group of ID users in Glasgow. The site relies mostly on images to support its text based content and services but also provides games and other interactive content throughout the site.

Symbol World

Symbol World is a popular symbol based news, magazine and reference site created by Widgit Software. Text-to-speech is optionally provided via BrowseAloud and Widgit’s own Web helper application Webwide. The Widgit-Rebus symbols used to support text on this site are the most commonly employed symbol system in the UK, although other similar notably those of Makaton, BLISS and PCS are also in widespread use.

Ookjij

A Dutch site for people with a learning disability. It uses sounds and pictures so it is easy and fun to use – even if you don’t speak the language.

Enabledlondon

Enabled London is a website about going out in London. The site has been developed by a group of people with disabilities, it has practical information opening times and wheelchair access to lots of London venues.

Easy Health

A health information website that aims to make health information easy to understand. It uses lots of video clips, some that have been made especially for the site and many from Channel 4’s Embarassing Illnesses TV series.

Here are some websites The Rix Centre have made:

• Trans-active
  Trans-active is a Mencap project which brings teenagers with and without intellectual disabilities together to make multimedia which communicates the interests, aspirations and support needs of the intellectually disabled participants.
• The Tate Project
  The Rix Centre was commissioned by HFT to make the TATE website to describe an inclusive project about employment to people with intellectual disabilities. Those with intellectual disabilities involved in the project have their own section called AT and Me where they can upload photographs and text.
• The Road Ahead
  The Road Ahead website was commissioned by SCIE to display online a report about young people with intellectual disabilites views on transition information. The research was carried out by a group of young people with intellectual disabilities from an advocacy group called North Somerset People First.
• p-cubed
  p-cubed was an experimental project produced by undergraduate students working with the Rix Centre. Its aim was to tell the stories of a group of adults with intellectual disabilities in a multimedia form which was engaging and innovative.
• Newham Easy Read
  This website is full of links to useful information about transition. This information has been created to help young people with learning disabilities to make choices when leaving school or college.

• Ping Pong: This is based on the classic game ping pong, and is accessible to switch users. There is no winning or losing, merely a progressively visually and acoustically enhanced game. The better a player performs the required actions, the more changes will happen to the game. This will be the case even if only one player manages to successfully perform the actions. See it in action at: dev.eyedea.eu/inmd
• iBrow: users to upload images of themselves and compose a list of their favourite things by choosing symbols. At the click of a button, users will view randomly-generated images of their listed items, and see pictures of other system users who also listed these items amongst their favourites. iBrow aims to create positive experiences through the pleasures of seeing, and to build human relationships through visual connections.
• Shopping Cart: this is a visual alternative to supermarket sites. Users can wheel a trolley through the aisles of a shop, and drag and drop content from shelves into their trolley. The amount of money they have available is displayed visually on screen, and this reduces proportionally as users select items to purchase.

We show some sites made by The Rix Centre, who are specialists in making websites for this group.

We also include some information about projects that INMD participants worked on.

mencap.org.ukmencap.org.uknewhameasyread.orgnewhameasyread.orgckuk.org.ukckuk.org.uk