The latest news from Meantime IT

Meantime IT has joined forces with design agency Plain Creative to deliver a fully Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) compliant website for Right Focus, a charitable organisation which supports disabled and disadvantaged people towards independent living.

The website is designed to provide information, advice and expert assistance to help people become independent by employing their own carer or personal assistant and managing their own personal budgets.

Part of the Oaklea Trust, an organisation employing more than 350 care workers around the north-west and north-east of England, the Right Focus site is accessed by hundreds of individuals each month to find out how they can manage their own personal budgets when it comes to enlisting the help of carers or finding their own accommodation. Because the majority of users accessing the site have disabilities including visual impairments, ease of accessibility was a must.

Neil Bowness is a partner at Plain Creative. He explains: “When Oaklea Trust asked us to design the Right Focus website, we knew that a simple design, bright colours and ease of use were a must. We designed the site with that in mind, but in terms of functionality the main crux of the site is down to Meantime.”

“We approached Meantime to work with us on this project because in our opinion, they lead the way when it comes to accessibility and other DDA issues,” Neil continues. “Because the Oaklea Trust works with a large number of local authorities, it was imperative that the site was fully DDA compliant, with no room for error.”

Steve Parker is Meantime’s lead developer. “We took Plain Creative’s DDA-friendly design and built several functions into the site which will ensure ease of use for the people using it,” he says. “There are very simple in-built functions that allow people to remove the pictures, view the site as basic text, change the font size and also switch colour-schemes: some people with impaired vision find it easier to read black text on a yellow background, for example.

“And the content management system we created for Right Focus allows them to change the content of the site without breaking up the design or affecting any of the accessibility functionality.”

Neil concludes: “From a technical point of view, the work that the guys at Meantime did was excellent. They’ve created a level of accessibility that will be a huge bonus for the people using it.”