Engaging
Public Life’s ward-winning website for disability charity John Grooms proves that a website can be both a model of accessibility and great to look at.
Our research with John Grooms service users showed that disabled people are actively turned off sites that have an ‘accessibility look’. Unappealing graphic design can be a barrier to user engagement.
To find out more about our research into accessible websites and user engagement, download a copy of our paper Are accessible websites failing to engage their users?, which was presented at the Human Computer Interaction conference 2005.
The John Grooms website was extensively user tested to check that it was both easy to use and a site that people would actually want to engage with. Test subjects responded well to the site’s lovely interface, beautiful photography online holiday bookings and lifestyle-oriented content in the Living section.
On the accessibility front, the site is fully standards compliant, as well as offering a number of innovative features that go beyond accepted accessibility standards. For example, the innovative ‘assistive search’ feature uses predictive text functionality to help users find what they are looking for with fewer clicks.
The John Grooms website is supported by AOL.
