We’ve been creating a series of diary entries about our journey to a cleaner and more eco-friendly website, and this is the next instalment. Check out our full Green For Good pledge here, where we outline eight steps we’re taking to reduce our carbon impact.

Here, we’re looking at pillar 7: Our site will be WCAG 2.1 AA compliant. This might seem odd at first, but the fact is that the standards demanded to make a website meet certain accessibility standards also make a site cleaner. And we do go on about this a lot to clients…so it’s time to walk the walk.

Check how copy works in other scripts

06/07/22 Ed Nicholson – Brand Experience Director

Accessibility is an important focal point for our work in websites, and as we discovered changes that improve accessibility often have positive impacts for page performance and consequently for carbon impacts. 

In the workshop held at the beginning of our journey we discussed looking at different languages that use different scripts, alphabets, syllabaries and so on, such as Japanese or the Cyrillic script. We wanted to know if optimising our content to support other languages would be worthwhile, to avoid Google translate doing it automatically.

However after looking at the data in Google Analytics, the majority of our traffic and services were centred towards English speaking countries, so we deemed this an unnecessary step to complete. Even if some carbon benefits emerged, they would be offset in terms of the effort of creating, hosting, and serving localised content and they would offer no business benefit. As with all other aspects of this project we wanted to find the balance between reducing carbon impacts of the site but also ensuring it is effective and efficient for us from a business perspective.