Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (TSBVI) is a leading center of educational expertise and resources for all Texas students who are blind, visually impaired, or deafblind. Their goal is to empower all of their students to lead productive and fulfilling lives.
Serving over 11,000 blind, visually impaired, or deafblind students throughout Texas, TSBVI works closely with schools, families, communities, and organizations to transform educational outcomes for students ages birth to 22. TSBVI also provides support through online courses, consultations, publications, and in-person training throughout Texas, addressing the needs of students that may never travel to Austin.
The TSBVI digital experience, consisting of multiple websites, thousands of content pages, and hundreds of digital assets, had become overgrown and incredibly hard to navigate. The organization needed a complete site re-imagining to build an inclusive experience for visually impaired students and families, the larger educational community, and state policymakers.
Enter Monkee-Boy.
Priority Goals
- WCAG AA Accessibility - Create a compelling & inclusive digital experience that can support the unique TSBVI unique community & student-body's needs
- Seamless Responsivity - Create a custom design that seamlessly transitions between viewports and doesn't degrade for screen magnification users.
- Elegant Experience - Develop an intuitive user experience that can support thousands of pages and five content levels.
- Microsite Migration - Seamlessly integrate two unique microsites into the overall digital ecosystem while retaining their independence, autonomy, and scalability.
- E-commerce - Deliver a fully-integrated shopping cart that connects to 3rd part, state-approved payment processors.
Challenges
- Massive Content Payload - Moving over two thousand pages of content and hundreds of supporting assets.
- Phase Content Delivery - Organizing, developing, loading & testing content in different phases as it was completed by TSBVI.
- Accessibility - Developing a deep accessibility strategy and testing protocol to ensure maximum access to web content & materials.
- Robust Redirect Strategy - Building a comprehensive redirect strategy to map 2500+ old URLs to new homes, ensuring that TSBVI's international community could easily find archived materials.
- Hard Launch - Get everything launched within eight months. No exceptions.
Integrated Websites
Robust Shopping Cart
Months to Launch
Content Pages & Assets
WCAG Compliance
New & Improved TSBVI Wildcats Logo
In addition to the full redesign project, TSBVI decided it was time to upgrade the school mascot logo. The source of the old mascot logo was unknown, and usage rights were a growing concern. What do you do to solve usage right concerns? Create your own.
Monkee-Boy was up to the task, created several custom concepts, and after approval by the student body, a new logo was adopted. Go Wildcats!
Audience-Oriented Experience
TSBVI’s site supports a lot of different audiences including parents, students, educators, staff, alumni, and policy-makers. In addition, because TSBVI supports visually impaired students across the state of Texas it also has a large Spanish-speaking population.
To help each audience quickly get oriented with the site and get started, Monkee-Boy created a unique navigation & landing page system.
In addition several sections include functionality that allows the TSBVI staff to create and manage Spanish-alternative content.
Accessible Shopping Cart
TSBVI provides both physical and digital educational resources to teachers and families around the globe.
To help create a more user-friendly experience for TSBVI’s unique audiences, Monkee-Boy customized WooCommerce to easily allow TSBVI staff to manage products, inventory, and streamline operations to help with delivery of all of their educational materials.
Accessible Recipe Microsite
During TSBVI’s discovery process, Monkee-Boy discovered several repositories of content that needed to be considered as part of the project.
One of those repositories housed content to help impaired users be more independent including 1000’s of recipes that allowed blind & visually impaired users to understand and access the ingredients & meal prep instructions normally found on food boxes.
Monkee-Boy built an easy to use tool to expand and manage the recipe library and ensured the content easily met accessibility standards for both users and assistive technology.
TX SenseAbilities Microsite
Tx SenseAbilities is a leading publication about visual impairment and deafblind education for families and professionals.
Monkee-Boy created a unique publication management system within WordPress that allowed TSBVI staff to easily create issues, create articles, manage audio tracks, and feature all of the above in both English & Spanish to support their varied Texas audiences.
Increase in Google Lighthouse Score (from 75 to a perfect 100)
Increase in Google Lighthouse Score (from 75 to a perfect 100)
Increase in Google Lighthouse Score (from 88 to a perfect 100)