Success Stories
Sport

Newcastle United Football Club

Newcastle United is a well-established Premier League Football Club founded in 1892. The club is in the heart of the city with its world-famous supporters – the Toon Army. Local boy Alan Shearer is a Newcastle legend who scored 206 goals for United. He remains the Premier League’s all-time record goal scorer.

A key era for the Toon Army was the 1990s when Alan Shearer was joined by the likes of Peter Beardsley, David Ginola, and Faustino Asprilla. Under Kevin Keegan, Newcastle United finished twice as Premier League runners-up entertaining fans across the country and beyond.

Our Brief

Newcastle United has linked all of its good work in the fields of welfare, diversity and inclusion under “United As One”. As part of this forward-thinking initiative, Newcastle United wanted to be able to connect with all of their fans regardless of their disability or where they live.

The easiest way to communicate with people as one inclusive community is through their website. To support people with disabilities, visual impairments, or people who speak English as a second language, they needed to provide accessible tools to allow people to engage with the club. Providing support online will enable more people to explore football fixtures, club news, and important information and be able to purchase tickets online.

Our Solution

To support “United As One” online Newcastle United introduced Recite Me onto their website at the start of the 2019/20 Premier League season. At the click of a button, all of the Newcastle United online content has been made immediately accessible, allowing all fans who may be disabled to easily access club news, fixture dates, and buy match tickets and merchandise.

The Recite Me assistive technology software provides fans 4 key groups of supporting features on a clean toolbar.

Screen Reader

Supporting fans to perceive and understand Newcastle United website content by reading aloud text, which can be customised to suit the viewer.

Styling options

Give supporters the ability to change the way the NUFC site looks. Users are able to customise the website’s colour scheme as well as the texts, font style, size, colour, and spacing.

Reading support

To simplify and support reading the Recite Me toolbar provides five main features; a ruler, screen mask, magnifier, margins, and a dictionary.

Translation

With fans from around the world, translation is a key feature for Newcastle United. The Recite Me assistive toolbar translates on-demand all web content into over 100 languages, including 35 text-to-speech voices.

"We are delighted to have launched Recite Me on our club website. Our collective aim at Newcastle United is to create a culture as varied as that of the great city we are honoured to represent. This toolbar is a tremendous step forward in ensuring that people can access news and information about our club more easily which will undoubtedly increase our reach and engagement. "