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The New Horizons Partnership

About New Horizons Partnership
Overview of Project
Project Findings
Project Recommendations
Results
Reference

About New Horizons Partnership

New Horizons Partnership is a cross-border, cross-community organisation that provides services to learning disabled and other disadvantaged clients. They focus on four main areas:

• Training learning disabled and other disadvantaged clients
• Supported Employment for those clients
• Social Enterprise employing this client group in real businesses, run on a not-for-profit basis by New Horizons
• Development of Learning Resources for organisations that provide services and training to individuals with a learning disability

Clients are referred to their service from both sides of the border. Their needs are assessed and a suitable training programme and employment path mapped out with them. Appropriate multimedia-based learning resources are developed in-house to help teach vocational and social skills to these learning disabled clients.

Following training, clients are helped to find employment by our supported employment team, who provide ongoing monitoring and assistance to both the client and the employer providing the placement. Alternatively they are employed by one of our own social enterprises, which include The Old Schoolhouse Cafe, New Horizons Garden Centre or our Electronic Business Cards enterprise.

Overview of Project

This Project required the New Horizons Partnership website to be thoroughly tested for accessibility and usability issues.

This was carried out through a manual analysis of the New Horizons Partnership website against the WAI guidelines and Usability guidelines, whereupon recommendations were made and the site was re-coded to ensure it was W3C compliant and user friendly.

In addition to this, further testing was carried out through real user testing.

Project Findings

It was found that the website contravened a number of usability and accessibility guidelines:

1- The site did not pass WAI compliancy and was therefore not accessible- An example of a Priority 1 defect was the fact that not all images had alternative text.

2- Users found difficulties trying to find information on the website

3- An example of one of the User Test performed can be viewed by clicking on the links below

Click here to download New Horizons test Part 1 (3,944 KB)
Click here to download New Horizons test Part 2 (8,749 KB)
Click here to download New Horizons test Part 3 (3,897 KB)
Click here to download New Horizons test Part 4 (6,694 KB)

Project Recommendations

Based on the findings from the thorough accessibility and usability testing, Elemental Creative Ltd recommended that the findings of the report be implemented into the website, so that the website could be both accessible and usable.

Results

The findings from the report were implemented into the website to ensure it was compliant to WAI guidelines and Usability Guidelines.

Click on this link to go to the newly redesigned website

Reference

To be completed!

© Accessible Ireland 2007