Achieve Australia is a disability and support organisation that provides disability services and NDIS plan management in Sydney, Hunter & Northern Rivers region of NSW. Their previous website was a poorly built WordPress setup that was difficult to manage and hard work to keep up to date, often requiring IT help. Because of the nature of their work, the website sorely needed an accessibility update for their specific audience.

Team Engaging IO has supported us launch a new website and we are 100% happy with the result. Geff and Binod have always been very attentive and proactive throughout the whole process. They have made our migration experience very smooth and have been supporting us to settle down with their excellent communication and knowledge. Highly recommended!

Nafisa Hasan - Digital Marketing Coordinator

The Challenge

Achieve Australia’s purpose is to support people with disabilities to be well, have a home, choose a career, learn new skills, participate in their community and enjoy a full life. These are all areas that can be extremely overwhelming and the old website just wasn’t providing good enough access to, and communication about, these services. The Achieve team were hamstrung by the CMS and weren’t able fix the underlying issues.

So, they came up with a two pronged approach, enlist a crack design consultant to redesign a more user friendly interface. And work with an Elite HubSpot partner (us!) to build a modular CMS structure they can use to easily manage the site. The intuitiveness of the HubSpot CMS along with its flexible customisation options meant that it was a perfect fit for the needs of Achieve’s internal team.

What did we do

We worked closely with the design consultant to ensure the proposed UI made the most of the HubSpot CMS. Once everyone was happy, we got stuck into development, mirroring the agreed design and ensuring the functional elements were built to spec. We built CMS modules and templates with two very important things in mind.

1) The website had to be easy to manage and update for the internal team

The simplicity of the HubSpot CMS meant we could set up the modules with guardrails for the Achieve team to allow them to stay on brand and reflect the agreed design. The drag and drop modules provided the Achieve team with countless variations of potential content to output, all the while staying on brand and accessible.

2) The website had to be comfortably accessible for their audience

The website was designed so that Achieve Australia’s users could access crucial support no matter what restrictions they may need to overcome. 

All of the code was refined specifically to meet the W3C accessibility standards. Our developers used mark-up to convey meaning and structure such as alternative text for images, keyboard input, role for html elements, aria-label, aria-labelledby and others. The code is also written in such a way that it adapts to the user’s technology such as Voice reader for mac, NVDA for windows amongst others.

We also created a bespoke widget where visitors can activate additional accessibility features, including:

• Changing the contrast of the site
• Highlighting links
• Increasing the text size of the website
• Pausing animations
• Dyslexia friendly fonts
• Print-friendly page formatting

Overall, these accessibility changes made to the new website helped carry the torch for future best practice for the Achieve team.

What happened next?

As a result of the website rebuild, Achieve Australia noticed an amazing level of investment from their team that had never been experienced before. The team had a new feeling of ownership simply because there was no barrier to being involved in managing it, much like the values Achieve holds for its clients.

Furthermore, there has been incredible feedback from clients and site visitors about the ease of access and navigation of the new website, which truly helps push forward the purpose of Achieve Australia in supporting people with disabilities.