I had a positive and enlightening meeting at the RNIB this morning. I’m going to be helping them launch a Facebook application in the coming weeks - nothing too clever, mind you. They’re less concerned about such an app being a money generator as they are increasing brand awareness. They recently rebranded themselves from this:

to this:

I didn’t understand this move at first but figured it was yet another organisation attempting an unnecessary rebranding exercise. Once it was explained to me, it seemed quite sensible. The old logo featured a man with a white stick, which reinforced the presumption that the RNIB only helps blind people; they actually help blind and partially sighted people, as their new motto confirms.

The RNIB are quite concerned that their logo and their cause do not enjoy the recognition that, say, cancer research or animal charities do. Hopefully the introduction of a Facebook app will help address this, if only in a small way.

I then spent another hour discussing the finer points of web accessibility. It’s surprising how little larger companies think of this, especially when one realises their legal obligation to do so. I suppose it’s simply because no-one has been sued over web accessibility in this country. The only high profile case was not, as you might guess, in the sue-happy United States, but in Australia. I wonder what impact that had on the web design/accessibility industry over there?

I found it very interesting to find that the early adopters of web accessibility standards now enjoy huge brand loyalty from blind and partially-sighted people; the main example being the always ubiquitous Tesco. Every little helps.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 7:49 pm and is filed under internet, web design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.