The Client
American Psychiatric Association Foundation (APA Foundation) is a division of the American Psychiatric Association, a world-leading psychiatric organization that now encompasses over 38,500 members practising in more than 100 countries. The APA Foundation’s primary focus is to provide employers tools, resources and the essential information to promote well-being and support the mental health of employees and their families. They also run community-based programs, fellowships and awards & grants, to address critical mental health needs and to direct resources where they are needed most.
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Project Scope
The APA Foundation required a new accessibility compliant platform to be the central point for their marketing and community engagement strategies. Therefore, it needed to provide an enhanced user experience and responsive design.
The new website needed to have all new templates and interfaces designed and built to fully comply with and meet WCAG 2.1 and ADA accessibility guidelines. The platform also needed to meet current organisational demands and objectives with the capacity to grow and evolve seamlessly in the future.
What we Delivered
Utilizing Kentico version 12 MVC, the new APA Foundation website displays a modern, fresh look with an excellent user experience. Adopting MVC has also meant the new site is now future-proofed with the latest technology and has a more straightforward path to future upgrades and updates. Kentico CMS meets the recommendations listed in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and follows US Government Section 508 and eGovernment requirements.
The solution that we delivered for the American Psychiatric Association Foundation has now been certified as fully compliant by Accessible 360, an organisation that specialises in Accessibility Auditing, through “live user testing”. This provides not just critical accessibility features but also includes features identified through the experience of disabled testers, which ensures ease of access for all those with hearing, visual and other impairments.
Single sign-on has been integrated into the website to access the administration interface. This has been set up in a way that ensures compliance with APA Foundation’s strict security policies and protocols.
The Build
Our developers are front-end experts, with years of experience coding state-of-the-art websites using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. For enhanced accessibility and adherence to web standards, our development process involved separating structure and presentation using CSS. This technique also has significant advantages for the evolution of the visual design of the website. Kentico’s CMS itself has a validation module that can test for HTML, CSS, Link and Accessibility validation on a page by page basis by a content administrator before publishing.
Kentico’s CMS is a fully accessible and standard-compliant content management system, allowing our team to deliver a solution that fully meets the W3C AA rating. The WYSIWYG editor within Kentico is an advanced version of CKEditor, an HTML editor that is designed for people with special needs which is WAI-ARIA and Section 508 compliant. It also supports high contrast and an interface keyboard navigation for older people or people with vision impairment.
The Result
The APA Foundation’s team now have an intuitive, easy to use, highly secure website that facilitates the showcasing of their services and community-based projects.
Adrian Bradley, CEO & Founder of i3 Digital stated:
We have been working with the team from the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for nearly 3 years now on a range of innovative web projects. We are proud to have been selected and entrusted with this project. As a Digital Agency, we have been focused for many years on delivering web solutions that utilize best practise in relation to accessibility and embrace everyone no matter what their disability or difficulties in life.
