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  3. Bracknell Forest Council

The Bracknell Forest Council website supports local citizens in finding information on housing, waste and recycling, services, transport, schools, leisure and more.

Continually improving the accessibility of their website has always been a high priority to ensure all citizens could access content and carry out relevant tasks.

For public sector websites and apps, building an accessible digital estate is not just a case of doing what is right. Following the 2019 EU Web Accessibility Directive, it is now a legal requirement.

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Services Provided

  • UX
  • Design
  • Drupal Development
  • Accessibility
  • Integrations with business systems

The challenge

The journey towards accessibility

Like many local authorities across the UK, Bracknell Forest Council wanted to adopt a digital-first approach to customer service, putting the power in the hands of its users to self-serve via the website where possible.

Their previous website did not have the flexibility or the functionality to support these ambitions, and with Drupal being used effectively by many other local authorities and governments agencies, it was Bracknell Forest's first choice of technology.

After initially employing an in-house Drupal Developer, Bracknell Forest Council instructed our experienced team via the public sector procurement system G-Cloud, to undertake a full audit of their work completed to date.

The solution

A robust platform to support future ambitions

We worked quickly and efficiently on the Drupal 8 site, ensuring this business-critical project could be delivered within the short timeframe and to budget. The new website is consistent with Drupal best-practice and coding standards. The meticulous work of our development team ensured that the site was a robust platform that would support the Council's future ambitions, and this has made ongoing support and iterative development of the site far more efficient.

Bracknell Forest Council employed our expertise on hosting support arrangements for their new website and after careful consideration, we migrated the site to a reliable managed hosting environment, which removed considerable risk from the client's in-house team.

Our front end website developers worked diligently to ensure all work was completed in line with Government Digital Service Standards guidelines. A dedicated accessibility expert was assigned to the council website build from day one to ensure the new site would be compliant with WCAG 2 level AA.

The outcome

Efficient and accessible user journey

The Bracknell Forest Council website, now built on Drupal, has a modern design, is mobile-responsive and follows Government Digital Service standards. Accessibility was, and continues to be, a high priority for the council to ensure all constituents could access their content and services. The new website complies with WCAG 2 level AA and has earnt the coveted Shaw Trust Accreditation for accessibility

The Drupal site has been very positively received by the residents of Bracknell Forest. Our analytics data shows that users are able to complete key user journeys on the site 50-60% faster when benchmarked against the previous site.

The site has also received a number of independent accolades, including being nominated as a finalist in the Digital Council of the Year award 2018 and it achieved an impressive 4-star rating when reviewed by Socitm.

“Accessibility has always been of key importance to us as a business. The team listened to our requirements and advised on best practices. The Shaw Trust Accessibility Accreditation stamp on our website is recognition of our hard work together.”

Colin Stenning, Head of Digital, Bracknell Forest Council