One of the main deliverables in Guide Dog Users of Canada's rebrand was the revitalization and redesign of their website. As the main demographic of the charity is largely visually impaired, blind, or deaf-blind, one of the most important considerations when designing the website was accessibility for the visually impaired. GDUC’s website at the time of the redesign was bare and reductive in a way that limited the charity’s ability to gain traction and new users. Although the mission of the charity is to provide educational resources and knowledge to guide dog users and the general public, their website provides neither. The new website design aims to provide what the old design lacked in an accessible and competent fashion. The website was designed with a cohesive global theme, with accessibility at the forefront of all decisions. The website was designed in a block layout, separating the content into digestible and consumable chunks of information, making navigation with screen readers and a keyboard easy and logical. The website has a default minimum type size of 20px. Usually, in web design, 16px is the default size for the type; however, 20px size type was used to ensure that users can read the content as easily as possible before going to their accessibility settings. In addition to increasing the default type size, the leading was also increased to 150% to ensure an accessible amount of line spacing to make reading easy and fast.
All type was left-aligned, except for a few circumstances, such as large headings and some text inside buttons. Buttons are easily identifiable with hover states to indicate interaction. The typeface Open Sans was used due to its accessible x-height and design. All graphic elements for navigation also have text accompanying them to ensure context is provided if users cannot see the graphic elements. All colour on the website is compliant with AODA AAA standards. The header was designed with a centred navigation list to allow for the Donate page to be the central focus of the navigation, as that is where traffic will hopefully be directed. The Donate navigation bar button is different than the rest of the navigation buttons to draw subconscious attention in hopes of convincing people to donate. At the right side of the header is a user settings menu which includes Accessibility Settings, where users can alter their settings such as type size, colour, etc. The user menu also includes general user information, the Emergency Fund information, and the application. The footer includes all of the social media links as well as a banner of GDUC partner logos to show appreciation and provide promotion for them. In the actual execution of the website, all imagery would have alt text tags to provide context to the imagery, as well as sufficient ARIA tags to support screen reading devices. As well as the block layout of the website, in the coded application, the variable type size would resize with the blocks to ensure that no content is distorted or cut off with increased type size.
