Accessibility

Making arts accessible for all is just as important to us as it is our users. We endeavour to keep making strides in improving our accessibility and looking to how technology can support our community and their visitors.

At CultureSuite, we believe that the richness of arts and culture should be accessible to everyone. We envision a future where digital accessibility is not an afterthought, but an integral part of every online interaction within the arts and culture sector.

We’ve partnered with Digitaal Toegankelijk to audit all visitor facing pages and templates including the marketing site and order flow, aiming to meet the WCAG AA standard. We’re pleased to announce the initial response from the auditing team has been promising, with us performing much better than a typical website. Nonetheless, accessibility is a constant endeavour, rather than a destination. So, we have compiled all of the recommendations into a project and are working working through the fixes iteratively with every 3 weekly release. You can follow along on our progress in our release notes. We’ll also seek to have periodic audits into the future as we develop new features.

As our users are still responsible for content and design decisions regarding their websites, we’ve also worked to create a dedicated audit package with support time built in to remedy any content and visual issues. As we’ve already undertaken the technical aspect of any accessibility considerations, we can offer this at a reduced rate to all of our users. Read about our accessibility package here.

Naturally, the Peppered Consultant team and UX/UI design team are aware of best practice accessibility considerations and are on hand to offer advice on any implementations we undertake going forward.

As part of our new dashboard launch, we’re also aiming to get a complete audit of this for our users and organisations staff too. We’re working on getting more key modules migrated, and will be striving to meet the AA accessibility standard here too.

We are also implementing a new approach to building new functionality, with automated testing by default. Our automated tests run continuously, ensuring every component follows accessibility guidelines without relying on manual reviews. This frees up time to focus manual review on delivering an inclusive experience for all users, rather than catching fundamental violations. Accessibility compliance is a core success metric that must be met before developers can ship new work, and these tests will help us towards this. All of this means that accessibility is built-in part of our design and development process, rather than a last-minute audit, leading to more consistent, high-quality digital experiences.

Both in visitor facing areas and in the dashboard, date selection is critical to key tasks. Our audit has uncovered that this isn’t always the most user friendly, especially for keyboard users. As it turns out, this isn’t something that’s been throughly solved in the wild, especially for so many use cases are ours. Therefore we’ve undertaken the creation of our own date picker to be used across the dashboard and our websites.

We are working on a more predictable alt text field not dependent on part type that can be used site wide, giving users granular control on where they need to add alt text in galleries and other locations.

We are also investigating where AI can play a part in speeding up manual tasks, such as assisting in the drafting of alt text.

Many of our users like to use the text overlay option for banners and flex grids. However, depending on the image chosen, this can cause contrast issues. Whilst we offer some techniques such as overlays, shadows and backgrounds to aid with colour contrast, this can be unpredictable due to the nature of different imagery. We’re looking to define a more robust solution that works in wider use cases.

We’re looking at ways to dynamically change text colour based on background colour contrast. E.g. auto switch to black/white text based on lighter/darker colours. This needs further experimentation to refine it.

Following the new order flow, we’re looking to overhaul the seat selection experience, looking at how we can bring a lot of new features and simplification for users requiring assistive technology to select seats.