Making a Community Center Website Accessible for All

screenshot of the goddard riverside website on a laptop and cell phone.

The Scope

Goddard Riverside serves more than 20,000 people a year of all ages on the Upper West Side and throughout New York City, with roots that date back to the settlement house movement of the late 1800s. They came to Bethink to optimize the accessibility features on their existing website after realizing they had major accessibility issues. 

Innovations

After conducting a full accessibility audit, our remediation included building a new website for them that would expand the functionality and meet the legal requirements of WCAG 2.0 level AA compliance.

New Site, New Host

screenshot of the goddard riverside website page about their programs and cause areas.

We built a Gutenberg website for Goddard for two reasons: to ensure flexibility that could endure future design changes, feature additions, and other changes with structural grace and integrity; and to ensure that the data in the website would be easily portable to a new database should Goddard ever outgrow it.

In order to launch the new website, Bethink worked with Goddard’s existing hosting platform to migrate the website to a new provider that had capacity for the rebuild.

Automated Content Migration

screenshot of the goddard riverside website media page, with a blog and press release list.

We moved content from the old Goddard site into Gutenberg, reducing bloat as we rebuilt the frame from scratch.

Embracing the Rainbow

screenshot of the goddard riverside website section devoted to their cause areas. each is emphasized with a border in a different color of the rainbow.

We worked intentionally to emphasize Goddard’s multi-color brand palette throughout the website, using the five different colors that define their brand in frames, accents, and buttons.

Accessibility Remediation

screenshot of the goddard riverside website accessibility statement.

We worked closely with Joe Dolson on this build, an accessibility expert in the WordPress community. Beth and Joe performed multiple audits and completed quality assurance testing and remediation for over 25 hours to ensure Goddard’s website was accessible to everyone in the community it serves.

Mentorship + Training

illustration of a woman using video chat to walk another woman through a process, with illustrations showing various steps.

Bethink mentored Goddard’s in-house designer on user experience and worked closely with her on design and development, ensuring that someone on their team would have a working knowledge of the website and its tools for necessary updates and edits.

Launch + Results

screenshot of the goddard riverside donation functionality.

BeThink has been retained by Goddard for support that is out of the scope of their current team — including evaluating donation management systems for accessibility, refactoring their on-site navigation, upgrading portions of their site theme to full-site-editing, and building in new functionality.

We also rebuilt the website of a second settlement house that Goddard is merging with, making it fully WCAG 2.0 level AA compliant and laying the groundwork for an eventual merger of the sites.