New City Bridge Trust website embodies inclusion and accessibility
Our new website is finally here, and we’re so excited to share what changes we’ve made to make the site more user-friendly and accessible
- Published: 24 January 2023
City Bridge Trust has been awarding grants since 1995 and over the years we have adapted to the needs of Londoners and the organisations that best serve them. While we award grants of more than 30 million per year, as a learning organisation, we are always asking ourselves what we could do better.
With that in mind, we set out to overhaul our website and make it easier to apply for funding. We used the opportunity to highlight the wider work of Bridge House Estates, the historic charity which not only supplies our funds but also owns and manages five of London’s iconic bridges, including Tower Bridge, under the trusteeship of the City of London Corporation.
We started by sourcing an agency with great experience working on similar projects and that held equity and inclusion at the forefront of their work. William Joseph is a creative agency designing inclusive products, services and brands for organisations working for positive change.
We went through extensive user testing with our key partners and audiences, to find out what worked and what didn’t. We needed to know where we were losing people, what language was causing confusion, which parts didn’t work for people using screen readers and which sections were just dull!
So what’s new?
- Using Plain English, wherever we can — it’s easy to slip into sector jargon, so we are trying to use clear language, which is accessible to the audiences we’re seeking to engage with.
- Better formatting across devices — our old website wasn’t well designed for mobile use, but our new website should work well across all devices. If it doesn’t, please let us know.
- Fewer PDFs across the website — we are trying to give people the information they need on the page, rather than making them download PDFs.
- Clear ALT tags where necessary — to ensure those using screen readers can easily understand image content and navigate our website’s pages.
- Bigger font — so people don’t have to struggle to read the text or zoom too much and distort the page.
- Using colours that make it as easy as possible to read what’s on the screen.
We will continue to learn and make changes as we go, and we welcome your feedback. If you’d like to get in touch about the website, please use the feedback form on the link below.