Sight Concern Bedfordshire’s website has been rated as the most accessible in the UK voluntary sector, ahead of several larger charities.
The sight loss charity, serving visually impaired people in Bedfordshire and Luton, this month overtook Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), with a score of 99 out of 100.
It entered the listings earlier this year in second spot, with a rating of 95, before rising to first place after redesigning its website.
Trailing behind Sight Concern Bedfordshire was JRF at second place with a score of 98, followed by Blind Veterans UK in the third place with a score of 94.
Sight Concern Bedfordshire also outperformed national charities like RNIB (ranked fourth), British Red Cross (ranked fifth) and Wellcome (ranked sixth).
The data ranking came from Silktide Index, which evaluates the web accessibility of organisations and assigns them a score based on their level of compliance with the globally-recognised standard for web accessibility.
‘Accessibility is at the heart of our mission’
Carol O’Brien, Sight Concern Bedfordshire chief executive, said: “Accessibility is at the heart of our mission.
“When you lose your sight you may lose the ability to see and read text. It’s vital that our website can be used by people with sight loss.
“As a sight loss charity we want to show what’s possible: achieving the most accessible charity website in the UK with a small team on a low budget.
“What once seemed like an impossible task, perpetually slipping down our to-do list, was transformed by the Developer Society: building our new site, and continuing to support us with insights and guidance to help us improve further.
“The sight loss community relies on a variety of assistive technologies and text-to-speech tools. Our site must function seamlessly with all of them.”
The charity had a total income of £313,000 for the financial year ending in 30 September 2023 and a total expenditure of £329,000 over the same period.
‘You don’t need the biggest budgets’
The Developer Society, a not-for-profit software company that helped Sight Concern to redesign its website, told Civil Society that its service for Sight Concern was a mix of pro-bono and paid work and cost “in the single digits of thousands”.
Stephen Hawkes, co-founder of the Developer Society, told Civil Society: “Sight Concern already had a website, and we used that as a basis for offering an alternative website.
“Our process was to radically reverse the process, starting with the screen-reader experience and working backward toward users without visual impairment. This not only helped to leap to good accessibility results, but also naturally distils down the content effort.
“As a not-for-profit ourselves, we’re keen to re-use the work we have done elsewhere and advance the access and quality of technology that the third sector can make use of. That’s basically what open-source should be.
“We want to make this something other organisations could use, especially small charities, so designated it to be highly replicable and adaptable and we could rebuild something similar for a small charity for around £5,000 to £9,000.
“It’s a great project and really shows that you don’t need to have the biggest budgets to get to accessibility outcomes.”
