I’m happy to announce that Mead & Hunt recently launched our new website. Over the past year and a half, we’ve worked with people companywide to develop a robust site that’s easy to navigate and more fully represents who we are as a firm. Our people-first values influence everything we do—including developing our new website. While there were a lot of items factoring into the development, one of the main areas we focused on was accessibility.
We’ve written before about the importance of not only promoting diversity, but fostering a sense of equity, inclusion, and belonging as well. Our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging (DEI&B) initiative began in the summer of 2018. We started our Employee Resource Group (ERG) about six months later. This has been a hugely beneficial experience for us as a firm, and we’ve learned so much throughout this process. We also formed several interest subgroups: individuals with disabilities, LGBTQ+, minorities, veterans-military, and women. These groups are fluid, and we will undoubtedly add others along the way. It’s important to continue to learn, change, and grow.
A huge part of fostering DEI&B is making our world accessible and easy to navigate for all. A guiding principle of our disabilities interest group is that each one of us will be impacted by disabilities in some form, at some point. Furthermore, between 8.5 to 20% of the population have disabilities that affect computer usage. As May 20th is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), we wanted to highlight the ways we incorporated accessibility into our new site. We focused on making our website work for everyone by:
- Using contrasting colors.
- Limiting unnecessary animations.
- Making the site responsive.
- Partnering with Accessibe, which provides screen reader adjustments, keyboard navigation, readability adjustments, and more.
- Making the site WCAG 2.1 AA Level Compliant.
Putting people first is what we do. This has always informed our actions as a firm, and now this is highlighted in our website as well. Feel free to check it out!