The background

With over 1500 homes across Scotland and 500 employees, Blackwood Homes and Care is a leading provider in managing and building highly accessible homes and delivering high quality, innovative care and support. Their objective is simple: to help people live their lives to the fullest.

The challenge

Each website user is unique with different capabilities, and Blackwood Homes and Care set out to find a solution which would assist visitors with visual impairments, learning difficulties and physical disabilities, as well as visitors with limited English.

Colleen Scott, Marketing Manager at Blackwood Homes and Care, describes the challenges the business faced with regards to users accessing online information: “Many of our customers have a range of physical and learning difficulties. Therefore having a responsive, accessible and adaptable website is critical.”

The solution

Blackwood Homes and Care decided to add ReachDeck to their website. A simple way to level up a website’s accessibility, ReachDeck promotes inclusion and helps increase a website’s usability so that its content can reach more visitors.

Reachdeck is an accessibility toolbar that adds speech, reading and translation support to websites, allowing users to personalise how they access content and services in a way that suits them best. It’s particularly beneficial for individuals who have hidden disabilities, such as dyslexia or other reading difficulties. The toolbar's accessibility features allow users to:

• Hear content read out loud
• Translate text into over 100 languages
• Increase the size of text with a text magnifier 
• Reduce screen glare with a screen tint overlay
• Focus more easily with a reading pane function
• Remove distracting content with the ability to simplify a webpage

Lasting value

Colleen goes on to explain why ReachDeck met their needs. “As we have a diverse customer base, language options have always proved difficult when trying to communicate with customers. The translation feature and the speak feature have both been great additions for us and our users.”

The addition of ReachDeck to Blackwood's website has helped them to provide user-friendly online service to a diverse range of users, and to improve their compliance with global accessibility regulations.

ReachDeck

As well as the accessibility toolbar, ReachDeck's features also include:

• The ReachDeck Auditor which identifies accessibility errors across your website. It highlights WCAG compliance errors at Level A, AA and AAA. And identifies readability errors including the use of jargon words and long sentences
• The ReachDeck Editor which helps to improve the quality and accessibility of written content. As you type, grammar, spelling and readability errors are identified. Helping organisations edit content in line with best practice
  

These features help organisations identify accessibility barriers quickly and at scale, while ensuring their content can be understood by everyone.