BUPA initiatives
RNIB's See it Right campaign
RNIB's See it Right campaign homepage
Throughout 2003, BUPA worked with the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) to make the Community Connections area of the BUPA website accessible. In January 2004, it was awarded the See it Right logo.
About the See it Right campaign
The RNIB launched the See it Right campaign in February 2002 as an initiative to encourage companies and organisations to make websites accessible to as many users as possible, including users with physical or visual impairments or learning disabilities.
As the RNIB explains:
"The growth of the world wide web means that people with sight problems now have the opportunity to enjoy a wealth of information and services that were previously unavailable to them, from up-to-the-minute news and travel timetables to online shopping and banking. With the help of synthesised speech and Braille display technology, even completely blind people can use the web.
"For these access technologies to work properly, web pages must be appropriately designed and must be written in valid hypertext mark-up language (HTML). Many sites are unusable by people with a sight problem simply because they are poorly designed and are written in invalid HTML. People with disabilities have as much of a right to be able to access websites as anyone else, but many designers fail to recognise this. The Web is an information medium, but too many web designers still think of it as a purely visual medium, and are unaware even that people with sight problems can access the web."
As part of this campaign, the RNIB awards the See it Right logo for use on sites audited according to the RNIB's accessibility criteria. When you see the See it Right logo on a website, you will know that the RNIB has assessed and judged the site within the past year and found it to have achieved a reasonable standard of accessibility.
How is accessibility measured?
For a website to be judged accessible, it must have been constructed according to a list of priorities laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an internationally-recognised body that sets the standards for coding websites.
The RNIB criteria include all of the W3C's priority one checkpoints, plus some priority twos and threes and certain other recommended best practices.
These priorities cover features such as ensuring all images have relevant hover text, all text is scalable using browser settings and all pop-up windows work if javascript is switched off in the browser.
Why is this accreditation only applied to Community Connections?
BUPA websites contain a vast amount of pages and fitting all the accessibility criteria to all existing pages on all BUPA sites is quite a task. However, the lessons learned from gaining recognition for making Community Connections fully accessible are being applied to all new BUPA websites and, slowly, existing pages.
You can find out more about the RNIB's See it Right campaign, and web accessibility in general, on the RNIB's website.
RNIB's See it Right campaign homepage
Feedback on accessibility
If you have any feedback for us on any accessibility issues, we welcome it gladly. Please email the BUPA webmaster.
Feedback on accessibility for the BUPA webmaster
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