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Elizabeth Pierce Olmsted, M.D. Center for the Visually Impaired

The Elizabeth Pierce Olmsted, M.D. Center for the Visually Impaired approached us because they had heard of our previous work for not-for-profits. We came highly recommended on our design and technical merit alone. But they had another set of requirements in which they had been unable to find any expertise - building a site to be used by the visually impaired, as well as the general public.

Armed with a testing environment made up of real users on assistive technologies, we were able to come up with a design that was still appealing to and usable by general users, but also fluid enough that anything from screen enlargers to speech browsers would see a site that was optimized for their use.

This site complies with the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML & CSS standards, AAA guidelines of the Web Accessibility Initiative, U.S. section 508, and U.K. accessibility guidelines.

The home page of the Elizabeth Pierce Olmsted, M.D. Center for the Visually Impaired offers links to the content, a brief description of the organization, and touts its accessibility and compliance features.

The Olmsted Center home page as seen in Lynx, a text-only browser. Since it's difficult to demonstrate how a text-to-speech browser would speak the site aloud, this shows how the browser itself sees the content.

A content page of the Olmsted Center site, showing some of the photos and content. Not only is the site targeted at the blind, but also at sighted users and those with vision impairments but who still have some or most of their vision.

As the content becomes more dense, structure is important for a web document so screen readers can parse the content and even allow users to navigate the content by headings alone. This image shows some of the structure as seen by those browsers.