TheArc

TheArc | For People With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Web accessibility refers to ensuring websites can be accessed even by disabled users. There are several website accessibility guidelines and regulations to follow. These include the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and Section 508 for the US. With WordPress accessibility plugins, you can make your site more compliant with these standards.

Challenge

The ARC’s mission is to serve people with intellectual and developmental disabilities by protects the human rights of people with IDD and actively supports. Our main purpose to create significantly stronger website experience to organize their content and convey what they do so that site visitors could find clear paths to what they need.

One of the main goal was to support multiple chapters feature, they have many smaller comapnies those are connected with the ARC and provide support to the disabled users. Our team has Integrate ARC with those smaller companies to help users so that they can find thier relative service nearby by applying states filter.

Our another focus on ARC web design was to build a scalable site for future growth while showcasing their work and addressing the needs of people with IDD. It was essential that their team be able to easily publish and manage it, and their people with IDD can make decisions about their lives as each person is unique.

  • Improve overall aesthetic and user experience and make the site more engaging
  • Implement a fully responsive solution backed by WordPress CMS
  • Increase the priority of accessible Resources for greater visibility for the disabled users
  • Improve usability of the Chapter feature to support multi-level website to be displayed
  • Implement a linguistic search against a depth website dataset using customization
  • Build out a powerful Chapter locator functionality filtered by user state
  • Provide an opportunity for deeper content to improve Performance & optimization
  • Reorganize and expand current blogs for enhanced search and content filtration
  • Implement global search with a relevant results engine

What We Did

To secure the success of The ARC program, Our Team searched for a solution that not only shows their content to people with IDD but also makes the site fully responsive and mobile-friendly for easy access on the go, while faster page speeds make finding information a seamless, efficient process.

Build out a powerful Theme functionality for improving user experience: 

When we started working with the ARC, they assigned us a task to analyze their current architecture and come up with some suggestions for improvements. Earlier, The ARC website had a poor UI experience and left a bad impression on the end users. 

The first improvement that we have suggested to them is to switch to a more appealing theme for their UI, we have suggested using ENFOLD theme for their website which offers a stunning visual builder through which you can customize your theme with effects, a shape divider, hovering items, and much more. Below are the main features of the ENFOLD theme.

  • POWERFUL LAYOUTS
  • Responsive designs that adapt to smaller devices 
  • SEO Optimized:
  • Unique Drag and Drop Template Builder
  • Amazing Admin Area

Provide Accessibility feature for the disabled peoples: 

One of the most important features of the ARC platform was its accessibility which is designed to help people with disabilities use technology more easily. ARC wants to use the accessibility feature for those who are not capable of accessing a website with ease.

In order to solve this problem, our team customized it and provide these accessible features, For example, highlight links, a bigger text feature that may read the text for those people with limited vision and a Dyslexia Friendly feature that allows users to increase webpage legibility for users with learning disorders.

Here are some common accessibility features that we have integrated with the ARC platform.

  • Light Contrast Features for Blind or low-vision computer Users
  • Hide Images feature
  • Dyslexia Friendly feature allows users to increase webpage legibility 
  • Line height Web Content Accessibility feature for paragraph read
  • High saturation feature to appear more vivid and alive
  • Pause Animation feature
  • Add a tooltip feature to read the content with ease

Responsive layout: 

One of the main problems of the ARC platform was responsive, their website was not responsive and had lots of issues in order of the user’s perspective, which led to a bad impression on the users. To solve these challenges, we used a pre-built theme that has pre-built components. The beauty of this theme is all the components are responsive across various resolutions or we can make them responsive with very less code.

Our Team quickly solves problems quickly and is able to keep up with the endless new resolutions and devices with every custom solution making for a better user experience. With responsive Web design, Our team creates custom solutions for a wider range of users, on a wider range of devices and platforms for the ARC website. With a responsive layout, we have done the below work:

  • Make the overall website responsive
  • Tested on Relevant Screen Resolutions for Responsive Web Design
  • Tried responsive images
  • Override attributes and CSS styles for different orientations and sizes
  • Ensure brand and design consistency across devices
  • Save time and development efforts by customization

Build out a powerful Chapter locator functionality: 

Another problem with old UI components as they were not designed to support multiple chapters searching. Due to that their community users were not able to find the other chapter’s details in their states.

In order to overcome this challenge, Our team modify the existing third-party PODS plugin to perform fast searches. using this way, We provide rapid, immense-depth search features to implement a fast search mechanism for searching Chapters on the basis of their states. This Chapter Portal offers timely, constantly updated information.

Other small companies chain support for disabled people: 

One of the other main challenges of THE ARC company was to connect with the other similar small companies that are created throughout the states. They want to connect them with the website so that disabled features can know about them and take advantage of their location.

Our team build a custom solution on the basis of their relative search and provide them the accurate information about the small other companies that are providing support to disabled peoples. With such a strong system by us, smaller companies will feel that they are part of a community and will become more dedicated and confident, which in turn will lead to a more successful platform.

Third-party PODS plugin Integration: 

The ARC platform has a lot of features and support but it also needed various new features such as franchise support, notifications, advanced search, etc to provide a great user experience. The main goal is to provide a bridge connection between other similar companies so that they may connect with them to provide human rights and IDD support for the users.

Making these features from scratch was a very time-consuming and high-cost task for The ARC. In order to reduce the efforts and cost, we have suggested them to use 3rd party PODS plugins to provide these features and management.

Performance & optimization:

Earlier, the Govmates website had low performance on Google PageSpeed Insights & GTmetrix. We have improved the website performance & optimization.

  • Slow loading times: The website was taking too long to load, which was causing frustration among customers. 
  • High bounce rate: Due to slow loading times, many customers were leaving the website without doing any activities, leading to a high bounce rate. 

Poor search engine ranking: The slow loading times and high bounce rate were also affecting their search engine ranking, as search engines prioritize websites that load faster and have lower bounce rates.

Technologies and Tools

Frontend Technologies
  • WordPress
Backend Technologies
  • PODS 
  • Custom Plugin
  • Accessibility support

Database

  • MySql
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