Breckland Council and South Holland District Council are two completely independent district councils in East England that share a senior management structure, which the local authorities believe is a more efficient operating model.
As public bodies it’s essential that both councils don’t exclude anyone from their communications.
Therefore, both councils needed to ensure that their new websites were accessible to as many people as possible, including those with disabilities.
We added the Recite Me assistive toolbar plugin to both websites so that users can quickly and easily adapt the websites to make them fully accessible.
Andy Prior, Digital & Customer Access Manager, Breckland Council and South Holland District Council, said that Recite Me’s number of features and ease of installation was key for both councils when they looked at web accessibility solutions.
“We have to have as many means as possible for local residents to contact both councils. So the more people we can get using our websites the better and having a disability shouldn’t exclude people from accessing the websites.
“The big attraction with Recite Me was the fact it had so many different features, which cover most eventualities including the need for translation.
“We previously used Google Translate on pages on the two websites, but it could only translate each page rather than the entire content of the two websites.
“Hopefully we have opened up each website to more people as a result of adding Recite Me, whether they have an accessibility issue due to a disability or impairment, or they don’t speak English as their first language.
“Recite Me came out on top of our procurement process due to the number of features it has and the ease of installation, compared to the overall cost.
“The ease of installation was key for us as we have limited resources and separate web development teams for each council, so we needed a solution that was straightforward and simple to install.
“It was very easy for us to implement Recite Me – all we had to do was add a small piece of code to the header and footer of each web page, with everything else managed for us by the Recite Me team.”
To find out more about how Recite Me’s tool bar can make your web content accessible to everyone book an appointment for a product demonstration and your free 30 day trial now. You can also try our free website accessibility checker here.
