Developing An Accessible Searchable Directory For Evenbreak

I’d like to tell you about a project that I have recently been working on called, Evenbreak. They provide such a fantastic service that I feel I need to spread the word.

The aim of Evenbreak is to help disabled people and inclusive employers find each other. Employers upload jobs and disabled people register their employment interests and upload their CV’s. Evenbreak was set up by Jane Hatton as a social enterprise and it is one of those rare projects that is run by and for disabled people.

“With Evenbreak, inclusive employers can be confident that they will attract additional disabled candidates that they may not find through any other recruitment channels. Disabled jobseekers can be confident that employers who have chosen to place their vacancies on this site are serious about looking beyond their disabilities to identify what skills they have to offer.”

“Evenbreak is run by disabled people, for disabled people. As a social enterprise we are keen to promote a positive image of disabled people in employment, and any surplus income will fund positive publicity campaigns promoting the benefits of employing disabled people, to balance out some of the current negative, and inaccurate, portrayals of disabled people in the media.”

Jane Hatton got in touch to ask if I could develop a new companion website that would provide employers with “confidence around the practical issues around inclusion and accessibility in the work place.” The new website would be a searchable resource of content related to inclusive employment. It would be a members only website.

Although the visual design of the site was already existed  (i.e. the existing Evenbreak site), my job was to create all the functional aspects. I.e. all of the membership requirements (registration, secure login, members access levels and so on), a way to add, edit, tag and display the content, a way to hide content from non-members and alternative ways to search the content. Although most of the content would be hidden there would need to be a way to show some ‘teaser’ content to encourage new members to join.

Jane already had a huge amount of content to add to the new site, including over 300 documents on every imaginable subject related to employing disabled people. All of this content needed to be stored, categorised and tagged appropriately to ensue it could be found. All the forms needed to be accessible and easy to use.

Within the constraints of fulfilling the aims for the site I was given a free rein in terms of the technologies used and the approach taken.

As the budget was small I decided to create the site using WordPress and where possible to create the functionality using existing technologies and modifications of existing plugins. The budget did not stretch to creating a custom application from scratch.

The other constraint, apart from money, was time. It all had to be functioning by the time of a pre-arranged meeting that Jane had set up to show the service to a room of potential corporate clients. The meeting date was set for 6 weeks from the point Jane got in touch.

Given the complexity of the project this was an incredibly tight time-frame. However, I did manage to provide a fully functioning website by the time of the meeting. The site was still located on my development server rather than on the evenbreak server at that point but nonetheless it was a bit of a miracle to get it done so quickly. The new site had to include a huge number of document and rsources so that the breadth of content could be demonstrated during the presentation.

The website is now live and can be found at Evenbreak Best Practice website.

I was delighted when Jane provide the following ‘testimonial’ which is so good it would get my in to heaven. 🙂

“Jim came highly recommended from experts in web accessibility, and so we engaged him to take over the Evenbreak site for us. However, Evenbreak is an online job board, and therefore a very complex site, with facilities for employers to pay for and post their roles, candidates to register and search for jobs, and many other complexities. Jim took all of this in his stride, having to understand the thinking of the previous developers very quickly. In addition to all of this, we asked Jim to design a bespoke portal for us, with very little lead-in time, which he worked on tirelessly, ensuring it was up to a fantastic standard for when we launched it.”

“I have vast confidence in Jim’s abilities, and am frankly quite amazed that he met all of our very demanding requirements so quickly and so professionally! We will be asking him to entirely re-build our site using his talents to build in both accessibility and responsiveness from the start. Many developers claim to have knowledge in these areas, but in my experience, very few if any have the practical knowledge and pragmatic approach that Jim has. I would advise any organisation looking for a high quality accessible website to talk to Jim. You won’t be disappointed (heąs also incredibly easy to work with).” Founder/Director, Evenbreak.

Give me a shout if you have an idea for a development project you would like to see realised. Tel: 07810 098119

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