Circle Voluntary Housing Association has been working for the last two years to build and deliver a more inclusive and user friendly website. A website that allows the end users to find out more about our service offering and how to engage more with our departments internally. We are proud to announce that in April 2023, our website is now ready for use.
Circle VHA are proud to be the first Approved Housing Body in Ireland, Housing Sector wide to be WCAG 2.1 compliant. With the rise in technology and the rapid advancements within the field, Circle are committed to accessibility for all and creating a truly inclusive environment. We are committed to making our electronic and information technologies accessible to individuals with disabilities by meeting or exceeding the WCAG requirements. We embody our WE HEAR (Willingness, Empowerment, Honesty, Excellence, Accountability and Respect) values and are determined to empower our tenants and we hold accountability that our website was not hitting the mark needed.
This commitment began with adaptations to our company website in accordance to WCAG standards with assistance provided by NCBI and The IA Labs (Inclusion Accessibility), both informationally policies and procedures being functional, ensuring all content is accessible to all users including those of our tenants, stakeholders and staff. We generated a review of all content on the old site to determine what was relevant and what we needed more of. This led to the decision to break our site into distinctive areas such as “My Home” this is for current tenants with links for tenants to be, “My Community” to offer support services where applicable and ways you can be involved in empowering your community alongside our stakeholder engagement side of “Property Management” and our “Development Hub” all designed for future business.
Albeit, this all met the WCAG standards for accessibility, but we wanted to take this opportunity one step further. To assist end users further we incorporated ReciteMe toolbar into our site. This toolbar, is fully inclusive to those who need additional services, it assists end users with language translations for both the website content and PDF’s translating it almost perfectly to their language of choice, it offers text to speech services for those who learn better through audio alongside colour changing mechanisms for the screen. This addition to our site extended the inclusivity offering of Circle.
We welcome comments on functionality, usage and ways to further improve the site accessibility from all users. If you would like to contact Circle in relation to faults in the accessibility you can contact info@circlevha.ie
To view our accessibility statement you can do so here.
