Castlepoint Shopping Park recently launched its new website which includes one of the first deployments of the new custom Textic Toolbox.
The Toolbox allows website owners to mix-and-match Textic accessibility tools and assemble them in a form to suit the site design and configuration.
Castlepoint's site is popular with shoppers looking for Park information and, as part of a general accessibility enhancement initiative, Castlepoint looked at ways of making the website even more accessible.
Castlepoint decided to generally clean up the website HTML code and revise upward standard font sizing and increase text contrast to increase readability. They also opted for Textic visual tools to allow font sizing to be increased and colourways changed to meet individual user preference.
Rather than deploy the full Textic Talklets Toolbar, the decision was made to opt for a simple on/off control for the point-to-read facility, using the standard UK male voice offered by Textic. The option of a save to MP3 facility was also considered desirable so this control was added to the Toolbox. Clicking the 'Save main story as MP3' control automatically identifies the main story on the page and gives it a logical name based on the first few words of the text.
Alternatively, drag-highlighting any text area and then clicking on the 'save' control allows chosen areas of text to be saved as audio.
Integration of the Toolbox was straightforward with a small JavaScript addition to three templates on the Castlepoint web management system provided by Standard Life Investments, owner of the Shopping Park. After internal testing, and with the JavaScript inserted on the site templates, the Toolbox, complete with all its accessibility enhancements cascaded throughout the site during the next site update.
Sarah Thornley, Business and Marketing Manager of Castlepoint, emphasises the Park's commitment to enhancing physical and digital accessibility and enjoys the luxury of a rather unusual budget to pay for a regular flow of enhancements... All illegal users of the Park's ample disabled parking facilities are charged a fee. The money raised goes into the 'disability pot' to fund developments such as the website evolution!
