Legal & General accessibility solution - at a glance

Legal & General is a leading financial services company offering simple, flexible and value for money financial products, from pensions to home insurance. Legal & General is one of Britain's top 50 FTSE companies with over 5.2 million customers and over 8,000 staff. The company has offices in the USA, France, Germany, Netherlands as well as the UK.

As a leading provider of financial products, Legal & General uses PDF files on its consumer website to deliver documents about its products and services, such as the key features of their financial products, fund fact sheets and application forms. The company also uses PDFs extensively for documents on its extranet sites for financial advisers, such as underwriting questionnaires, administration guides, fund performance information, financial product key features, brochures and application forms.

Brochures, leaflets, posters, flyers and other artwork are also distributed throughout the company in PDF format for proofing and approval. In addition, artwork from Legal & General's creative agencies is often sent in PDF format.

Committed to accessibility

Legal & General is committed to improving the accessibility of its website communications; accessibility is part of the organisation's brand values. As PDFs play an increasingly major role in disseminating information on the company Website it was important to ensure that these met the standards required for Royal National Institute of the Blind 'See It Right' and WAI Level 2 accreditations.

To ensure this level of accessibility to all employees and customers, the company asked Mekon to create a guide to accessibility best practice which the company and its outsourcers could use to ensure they abide by the Disability Discrimination Act and meet accreditation standards.

"Legal & General has always considered the issue of accessibility to be of the greatest importance," said Caroline Fawcett, Marketing Director at Legal & General.
"As a company we try to consider the needs of all our customers, so having best practice guidelines that provide us with a practical, consistent and comprehensive approach to achieving accessibility was considered vital."

What is the Disability Discrimination Act 1995?

The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 gives disabled people rights in the areas of employment, access to goods, facilities and services, and buying or renting land or property. Web-based services such as web pages and PDF files are covered by the Act when they are being used to provide goods, facilities and /or services to members of the public.

The Act therefore requires that if a company is providing services via the Internet using web pages and Adobe PDF files, it has a duty, within reason, to make them accessible to disabled persons.

As more and more companies use PDFs it is essential that these also meet the requirements of the Act. If a service provider does nothing to aid disabled peoples' access to their online services, they could be in breach of the law.

Setting best practice guidelines

Legal & General’s website developers had noted that the company’s PDFs were not optimised for website use. This resulted in PDFs that did not open in a consistent manner, were not linked to bookmarks which make document navigation easier and the graphics were of a higher resolution than they needed to be - making the PDF slow to download.

“Tests by our usability agency showed that PDFs on our website were not accessible to screen reader technology,” commented Caroline Fawcett. “This prompted us to take action to make some changes to improve the accessibility of our PDFs.”

Legal & General approached Mekon to analyse the PDFs on its website and then create ‘best practice’ guidelines so that staff and agencies could create PDFs which were easily accessible for both disabled and able-bodied people. The guidelines would ensure a common, consistent and reliable approach to creating PDF files.

The recommendations

Mekon advised that as part of making documents more accessible, Legal & General should adopt methods to enhance readability by using the features already inherent in Adobe Acrobat (based on version 6) such as:

A wider accessibility initiative

As part of a wider accessibility initiative at Legal & General, the company is in the process of revising its website to improve its accessibility.

“Establishing guidelines for creating accessible PDF documents is the first phase of our plan to make our whole website more accessible,” commented Caroline Fawcett.
“We hope to achieve the Royal National Institute of the Blind ‘See It Right’ and WAI Level 2 accreditation upon completion of our change plan.”

“We hope that by meeting the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act, our customers will find our website and PDFs easier to use and quicker to download, improving their experience and, hopefully, encouraging them to find out more about us and how we can help. We value all our customers and want to make their experience of dealing with Legal & General as positive as possible; even something as simple as using our website.”

Legal & General uses selected agencies to create their PDFs and all of these agencies are expected to follow the best practice guidelines and recommendations. In addition, the Website Management Team also review all PDFs to ensure that they meet accessibility criteria before they are migrated on to the company website.

Legal & General aims to have all PDFs on its Website meet accessibility standards within a year of the best practice guide being adopted by production agencies.

  Back to top