At the recent Visionary Design Awards in London, Libertas Solutions CMS were the only company from Ireland to have four clients as finalists at the event and one outright winner.
Beating off stiff competition from other finalists including fellow Libertas Solutions client Turkington Holdings, Philip Murphy Associates won their Visionary Design Award in the Small Commercial category due to the simplicity of the design and the accessibility features it offers for visitors who have various disabilities.
The website is powered by Libertas Solutions’ web content management software, Libertas Solutions CMS, which ensures that the code used to produce the site is compliant with the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), UK Government Access Keys for easy navigation, as well as providing a separate text only version of the site which is useful for people with visual difficulties and those with dyslexia.
The awards, organised by the National Library for the Blind to celebrate accessible websites for people with disabilities was hosted by Lloyd Grossman and sponsored by Barclays Bank.
Neil Curran, managing director of Libertas Solutions explained “Accessibility is like building a house – if the groundwork is done correcly at the beginning, making websites accessible to people with disabilities is not such a big job; if left until later, then the task becomes much more difficult. Businesses can benefit by making marketing information, products and services available to a wider audience who cannot gain access to competitors' sites."
Chief Executive of the National Library for the Blind Helen Brazier outlined the rationale behind the event “These awards are incredibly important. We estimate that less than a third of all websites are accessible to visually impaired people and our challenge to web designers and publishers is to create sites which are attractive and informative, but also comply with the Disability Discrimination Act by being accessible too.”
The only company from Ireland to have nominations in the awards, Libertas Solutions also had three other clients’ sites shortlisted because of the accessibility of their websites – the Ocean Youth Trust (Ireland) (www.oyti.org ), the University of Ulster Coleraine Fencing Club (www.uucfencing.co.uk ) and Portadown based Turkington Holdings Ltd (www.turkington-holdings.com ).

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