The Chicago Lighthouse

The Challenge

The Chicago Lighthouse is a visionary organization that provides vision rehabilitation services, education, employment opportunities and assistive technology for the blind, visually impaired, disabled and Veteran communities. When the organization engaged Briteweb to do a brand strategy, visual identity and web redesign, we could see that we had our work cut out for us.

The organization, which was over 100 years old, hadn’t adapted their brand strategy or redesigned their visual identity and website in over a decade. Over the years, their website content had grown denser and denser as the organization’s staff updated and added to it; the navigation hierarchy was eight layers deep – at least five layers beyond what is considered best practice. Without a content strategy in place, the site had become a behemoth that desperately needed taming.

It also needed rewriting. The tone of The Chicago Lighthouse’s content was sterile and medical – a stark contrast to who the organization is. Their Chicago facility is one of the warmest, most welcoming places our team has ever experienced; the organization needed a brand personality and voice that reflected the inviting, loving community they’d fostered.

But that wasn’t the real problem. That’s the fun stuff.

The real problem was that The Chicago Lighthouse’s website wasn’t accessible to the number one community they serve – people who are blind and visually impaired. A challenge Briteweb had never tackled before, but one we were game to take on.

Approach

With The Chicago Lighthouse, our team faced a steeper on-boarding process than usual. We needed to learn not only about the organization and what it does – which is a lot – but also about audiences who lack or partially lack abilities that we take for granted when designing brands and websites.

To better serve these audiences, we made a lot of effort to understand the perspective of people who are blind and visually impaired, and how they experience and navigate the digital world. Our Lead Strategist was blindfolded by a member of The Chicago Lighthouse’s team, and shown how navigation tools for the blind work. Because he is fully blind, this team member typically doesn’t even turn on his computer monitor, while other visually impaired staff members do, using screen reading or screen magnification aids. Each of these tools affects a user’s experience of a website, and needed to be considered by our design and development teams.

Though we typically do audience analysis and profiling, the process with Lighthouse was on another level. The Chicago Lighthouse’s audiences are multiple, and diverse: patients, clients and consumers representing a spectrum of abilities (visually impaired to fully blind), those patients’ caregivers, plus potential and existing donors, event attendees, medical professionals, researchers, veterans, employees and potential employees – to name just a few. After interviewing representatives from each stakeholder group to understand what they needed and wanted from The Chicago Lighthouse site, we ultimately created audience profiles for three important target demographics. These profiles have been well-used and widely distribution by The Chicago Lighthouse, whose partners have often struggled to understand the organization’s unique stakeholder groups.

Understanding these audience groups helped Briteweb to create a content strategy that funnelled users to sections of the site that were appropriate to them and their needs. Instead of requiring audiences to sort through layers of content to find what they needed – a particularly cumbersome process when you’re visually impaired – the new strategy allowed users to self-identify where they fit within the organization, and quickly and intuitively navigate to the content appropriate to their needs.

The complex audience groups also had major design implications. Most significantly, our designers and developers needed to produce a site that was appealing to both sighted and visually impaired people; it had to be attractive to someone who could see, and functional to someone who couldn’t. The design and development teams also did extensive research, speaking to members of the Lighthouse team and attending a conference in Seattle to learn about designing and building sites for the visually impaired.

What they learned influenced the choices they made throughout the process. When redesigning Lighthouse’s logo, they selected a font that was circular, bulbous and open, which has high natural legibility for anyone, and high legibility for the visually impaired. They kept the lighthouse – used by many organizations working with the visually impaired to represent a beacon of hope – but updated it for increased visibility by using high-contrast shades (white, navy blue, and bright orange) and making it more iconic and stamp-like. 

Briteweb also worked with Lighthouse to develop a new brand personality, helping them land on a brand archetype that reflected them as a beacon of hope and a community of care. Their archetype’s warmer and more nurturing spirit could immediately be felt in the content produced for the new site.

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