Orwell Housing Association, in partnership with A Recipe for Success, have launched a brand new website which meets AAA Accessibility, the highest level of accessibility a website can achieve.

From 1999 the Disability and Discrimination Act (DDA) required that disabled people must have effective access to services and information for UK organisations. This requirement also included access to company websites and online services. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has established three levels (A, AA and AAA) of accessibility for websites to adhere to.
The W3C AAA standard represents the highest level of accessibility compliance that a web site can achieve, and demonstrates that the Orwell Housing site goes beyond the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act.

The project to re-build from scratch, and re-launch the Orwell Housing site was handled by local company A Recipe for Success. Jess Read commented: “A Recipe for Success started working on the website project at the start of 2008. Several workshops were held, with input from staff, resident groups and committee members. From here it was clear that accessibility was a key factor for the site. Orwell quite rightly wanted to ensure the site was not only informative, visual appealing and technically easy to use – but also as assessable as possible for visitors, with or without disabilities. The Orwell site is certainly achieving more than the average website and plans are afoot to develop the website even further We are delighted to have been involved in this project and applaud Orwell Housing for the work they have put in.”

Claire Risdale, Information Services Manager at Orwell Housing added: “Both A Recipe for Success and Orwell have worked hard to meet and achieve the AAA guidelines. We feel we have shown great consideration and understanding of our audience, spending extra time and effort to accommodate all our user groups. Our website is an extremely important tool for us and with the help and guidance from the team at A Recipe For Success we have been able to launch a first class website which has already received much praise from our users.”

Visit the Orwell Housing website - www.orwell-housing.co.uk