National Industries for the Blind partners with Materiell to create an accessible site along with WordPress managed hosting and support.
Since 1938, National Industries for the Blind (NIB) has focused on enhancing the opportunities for economic and personal independence of people who are blind, primarily through creating, sustaining, and improving employment. NIB and its network of associated nonprofit agencies are the nation’s largest employer of people who are blind through the manufacture and provision of SKILCRAFT and other products and services of the AbilityOne Program.
Services
- Enterprise Managed WordPress Hosting
- WordPress Maintenance and Support
- Content Migration from Drupal
- Web Development
- Web Design
- WCAG 2.0 AA w/optional AAA Development
- User Training
- Content Organization Strategy consulting
Needs
NIB’s website serves as a reliable information resource for their audiences and communities. Most importantly, they needed a new site that used the highest standards of accessibility and included responsive design and responsive accessibility. In addition to the front-end accessibility, NIB also required the back-end to be accessible so their sight-imparied staff could easily create, edit, and manage content on their site.
NIB smartly evaluated their content organization how their users interact with and search for information. They wanted the user experience to be as user friendly and intuitive as possible. It was also important to NIB to have well-thought out landing pages to accommodate all of the various industries and types of employment positions they work with.
While NIB has significant IT staff; however, they didn’t want to use their valuable resources on maintaining their public websites. They needed a hosting, maintenance, and support partner that were experts in WordPress and could continuously improve their site’s performance, maintain and update their accessibility standards, and keep their site secure and reliable.
Solution
Materiell developed the new NIB site with a hybrid of WCAG 2.0 AA and AAA standards in mind. The foundation of the site was simplified and carefully constructed so that even the backend processes were accessible and more user-friendly for all of their staff. Materiell simplified the post-types, created . The result of the new architecture meant the NIB homepage tested even faster than Google.
For the front-end visitor, Materiell worked with NIB to properly adjust the design and color contrast of the site without interrupting NIB branding or logo. Some additional accessibility features include such as keyboard navigation, using “alt tags” or alternative descriptions on photos, providing transcript options and closed-captioning on videos, and the ability for screen readers to easily interact with the site.
With performance and reliability in mind, Materiell’s hosting, maintenance and support services were tailored to NIB’s specific needs. Site speed and performance improved dramatically once Materiell moved the NIB site to their hosting environment.
Materiell’s team of WordPress experts provides full WordPress support to the NIB staff as needed. Materiell also audits the code regularly, particularly for accessibility, and makes updates accordingly.
