Central Bedfordshire Council has seen the immediate benefit of adding web accessibility software Recite Me to its website.
Since adding Recite Me to the council’s website in April, over three thousand people have used Recite Me to tailor the website to a format that suits their needs best.
When Central Bedfordshire Council, which serves a population of 274,000, designed a new website it built the site to be accessible for everyone, ensuring that it complies with level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.
And the council wanted to take this a step further to enable customers who needed a little extra help using the site who might not necessarily use specialist screen reading equipment, so they turned to Recite Me.
Recite Me’s web accessibility solution
Recite Me’s accessibility and language toolbar was installed onto the Central Bedfordshire Council website and is accessible via a button in the top left corner of the website.
The button is clearly labelled with the words ‘Audio visual help’, plus a loud speaker icon and an eye icon.
The Recite Me toolbar lets anyone view the website in a format that is fully accessible for them.
It lets people change elements such as the font size, plus the font colour and background colour contrast, as well as giving the option to have the text read out aloud.
It also gives people the option to translate any bit of written web content into over 100 different languages.
Over 3000 people have used Recite Me so far
Central Bedfordshire Council have already measured a large number of people using Recite Me on its website.
Alan Ferguson, Web Manager (Communications), Central Bedfordshire Council, said: “We found out about Recite Me through online research.
“We looked at a number of other council websites to see if they had accessibility tools and then assessed what Recite Me had to offer.
“We launched Recite Me just over two months ago (April 2017) and promoted this heavily on our social media channels.
“We have had over three thousand customers using the product since its launch. This is testament to our reasoning to adding this product to our website.
“We will continue to promote this as we are aware nationally that around 20% of the UK population have some form of disability.”
Try Recite Me for free on your website
If you want to find out how you can make your website more accessible using Recite Me book an appointment for a product demonstration and your free 30-day trial now.
You can read the case study here
