SXiQ has enabled Vision Australia to migrate to SharePoint Online, consolidating 33 subsites to create a simple, accessible environment for their vision impaired staff population.
Background
Vision Australia was using SharePoint 2010 to host a document sharing platform known as Document Portal, made up of 33 sub-sites. This was confusing and time consuming for their vision impaired team.
The engagement with SXiQ was to assist Vision Australia with the migration of a subset of Sites / Libraries that came under an ‘All Vision Australia’ site collection, to SharePoint Online, which aligned with the release of their Intranet “The Hub”.
Crucial to the project was ensuring the new SharePoint Online solution was tested for Accessibility (for Blindness and Low Vision).
The Challenge
- Decentralised storage of documents and information
- A high population of blind or visually impaired employees with Accessibility requirements.
Vision Australia’s document management system was spread across 33 subsites, resulting in a fragmented and confusing experience for employees.
The site needed to be designed with accessibility guidelines to cater for the high population of visually impaired staff at Vision Australia. The SXiQ Project Team worked very closely with the Accessibility Expert at Vision Australia right from the start of the project.
The Solution
- Implementation of a SharePoint Online system, consolidating document subsites into one ‘All Vision Australia’ Online Site.
- The design centered around Accessibility requirements in partnership with VA’s Accessibility Expert & JAWS testing
The landing page layout has been designed with a simple, clean and easy to find approach.
SXiQ worked closely with Microsoft to design the site with the SharePoint Modern Site ‘out of the box’ features and with ‘out of the box’ accessibility guidelines. Minor changes such as having the Quick links to the left of the landing page, alternative text for the icons on the quick links, having the landing page blurb to the right, less or no images on any of the pages helped a lot from a Navigation / Accessibility perspective.
All the quick links and the image(s) have alternative text behind for accessibility and the top Navigation is consistent across the entire Site.
“Our new SharePoint Online solution delivers a simple, clean & easy to find experience for our vision-impaired team.”
Senaka Mapa | IT Manager
The Results
- Industry-leading SharePoint Online migration, beautifully designed.
- Centralised, consistent, accessible environment for all document storage.
- High uptake and change adoption due to a suite of SharePoint Online Help training videos created by SXiQ
Vision Australia, in close partnership with SXiQ, have enabled their staff to efficiently and effectively engage with organisational information, centralised documentation in a consistently designed, accessible SharePoint online environment.
Vision Australia’s key objectives of successfully migrating 33 different document sites into one SharePoint Online Site and ensuring accessibility to improve the experience of their staff, were met.
SXiQ went above and beyond and created custom ‘Help’ training videos for Vision Australia to assist with Change and Adoption.
This project has laid the foundation for the Document Portal with the learnings for the future migration of the entire Portal in a structured/templated approach to align with Vision Australia Office 365 rollout strategy.
Download the use case here Vision Australia Sharepoint Migration Use Case
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