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New Website a Model of Accessibility for Vision Impaired
San Francisco, CA, August 25, 2005 — The newly designed Glaucoma Research Foundation (GRF) website, www.glaucoma.org, already the number one search engine result for “glaucoma,” launched this week.
The site, attracting 440,000 unique visitors annually, features an innovative new interface that is a model of Internet accessibility for the visually impaired.
Thomas M. Brunner, President & CEO of GRF cites recent national demographic tracking: the fastest growing segment of Internet users are people age 50+, a phenomenon reflected in GRF’s own constituents’ exponentially expanding Internet usage as their preferred tool of communication and source of health information.
“To better serve our constituents,” Brunner explained, “we evolved an existing staff position into Director of Communications, to improve our website and implement pro-active communication services, and we retained Mule Design to redesign the site.”
Andrew Jackson, appointed to the position of Director of Communications, led the redesign project. Some of the features that make the website a model of accessibility include:
- One source of content available in multiple presentation modes that instantaneously transform every page on the site (as opposed to the old model where content for the vision impaired was often created and maintained separately, but not always kept current);
- A variety of presentations, according to user need, including changes of contrast to reduce glare, three different font sizes (Large, Larger, Largest) and a single column format for those with low peripheral vision;
- Archived video viewed with a single click on “play,” with no additional browser configuration required; video is always accompanied by a transcript of video content.
Mike Monteiro of Mule Design, lead designer for the new website, summed up the goal of creating a model accessible website: “Ultimately, the goal isn’t to create one accessible site, but to make every site accessible. Good design practices for accessibility are simply good design principles that, followed properly, serve to improve the interface design and ease of use for all site visitors.”