Vitaltech
W3C AA-level accessible website for tech information portal.
Led by the Thomas Pocklington Trust, Vitaltech is for everyone from tech newbies to highly experienced tech aficionados. It is an impartial site set up to provide information and guidance on assistive devices for the blind and visually impaired, their friends and family, and healthcare professionals.

Objective
Thomas Pocklington Trust, the lead charity behind the new venture, already provides a broad range of services for the blind throughout London and the UK, and decided to work with Granite 5 partly due to our experience delivering highly accessible products including within the VI (visual impairment) sector.
The aim for the new Vitaltech website was to provide an impartial tech-focused information portal, highlighting the diverse range of technology which can improve the lives of the blind and visually impaired.
Impact
65%
Increase in organic search traffic
15
Different browser technologies supported
98%
Positive feedback on website accessibility and usability
Approach
The nature of the website and objectives behind creating it reinforced the need to harness the latest tools and technologies, to deliver a highly accessible and interactive website. This was set to be one of our most usable sites, and we’re really pleased with the results.
We seized the opportunity to put our website accessibility experience to good use but also to learn about new and improved techniques. We aimed for AAA standard of the WAI WCAG for the navigation and AA for the rest of the site, to ensure that the site is usable for a wide range of assistive devices including screen readers, magnification tools and simple input devices.
We built in the following advanced accessibility features:
- Voice search making the site easy to navigate with voice commands
- Text to speech using Amazon Polly making it possible for users to listen to the website
- Sequential tab ordering to assist navigation without a mouse
- Colour contrast switch with options for users to choose the most suitable view for their visual needs
- Closed captioning and subtitling on video content to provide content for deaf users.
- Focus states, alt tags, title tags and more…

Highlight: Amazon Polly
We have integrated the site with the Amazon Polly platform, a service which turns text into lifelike speech providing an invaluable feature for blind and visually impaired users.
Amazon Polly is a paid for service, however by caching and storing media files locally we are able to keep costs low. Amazon Polly lets you convert 5 million characters per month for free during the first year, so we’ll be rolling out this feature to other VI sites.