The Brief

The Barbican Digital Products Team commissioned an independent accessibility audit for its primary digital property, barbican.org.uk. Synechis were engaged as Drupal specialists to work with the Barbican team to remedy issues raised in the audit. The brief was later extended to also develop the accounts section of the e-ticketing application to give the Barbican Team greater control over the user experience.

Our Solution

Following onboarding, our successful approach included looking across issues raised by the audit to identify groups of issues that had similar technical solutions, thereby working far more efficiently than had we addressed issues in isolation. We were able to hit the ground running in exceeding expectations and targets.

Excellent communication with the Barbican team was also a key factor, facilitated by regular meetings and daily check ins over Microsoft Teams. Thanks to the Barbican team’s agile approach we were highly effective in discussing solutions, addressing issues as they were discovered and committing robust code that was reviewed and tested by the Barbican’s team.

Some of our contributions to improving the accessibility of the Drupal site included reworking the main navigation to make it keyboard accessible; working across accordions and anchor tags so they could be activated by keyboard; creating screen reader friendly versions of event listings, titles and buttons; and making icons screen reader friendly. We also worked on accessibility fixes for the cart and checkout in vue.js, which included solutions for keyboard accessibility, error code messaging for screen readers and styling fixes.

With accessibility work completed ahead of target, the brief was extended. Building on the work that the Barbican team had already done, the team had a need for granular control over the user experience such as forms and on screen messages in the account section that the current embedded approach did not allow them.

Using vue.js, we connected the Account section through the Spektrix API that handles membership, event ticket and merchandise sales. This included sending and receiving data to Spektrix platform, performing operations and building forms for users to manage their accounts, including an address look up form.

During much of our time working with the Barbican, the centre was closed due to government restrictions to combat the Coronavirus pandemic. It was a privilege to support the Barbican at such a critical time and enabling their development team to focus their time on live streaming events from the centre, such as Professor Brian Cox and video archive offering.