At the start of the year, we were looking to implement some improvements to our website, www.icanbea.org.uk – a free, easy to use careers inspiration tool, focussed on helping 12-25 year olds in Suffolk and Norfolk.
We met with students from the SEND Young Person’s Network who took part in a fun and fascinating workshop, after which we had identified three areas for improvement: Navigation, Service Filters and Visual / Comprehension Aids.
Some of the changes include:
- Switching to tile-based navigation on our homepage, which visually presents links to the website’s main features, as well as highlighting current news and events.
- The ability to identify local employers who are signed up to the Government’s Disability Confident (DC) Scheme. Users can now filter the list of 650+ organisations that we work with to see those DC employers.
- Badges to identity the employers themselves visually – by the placement of the DC logo on relevant organisation profiles.
- A full-featured accessibility widget which is available across the entirety of the main site, via the circular person icon at the top of each page. This offers all sorts of spacing, alignment, text size, image and colour adjustments, as well as set profiles to improve the website experience for people with Dyslexia and ADHD. Among other features, it also contains an integrated Screen Reader and Dictionary.
The improvement project has been a great exercise working towards giving local young people the tools they want to further their careers, training and education.
-The Mason Trust, September 2023
Find more information on ‘next steps’ for young people with additional needs on ‘I have additional needs section’.