Auditorial running on a laptop, a tablet and a phone, showing an illustrated jungle scene with an orangutan and the story's setup options for colour palette, contrast and motion.

More than 97% of the top million websites have accessibility problems. For the 300 million or so people around the world who are blind or have low vision, that turns a lot of the internet, and particularly the rich, visual, scrolly storytelling that news sites love, into a frustrating mess.

Google, The Guardian and the Royal National Institute of Blind People got together to set a new benchmark, and we at R/GA designed and built it. The result is Auditorial: a storytelling website that adapts to the senses of whoever is reading it. It launched on Global Accessibility Awareness Day in May 2021.

One story, a hundred ways to experience it

You can read it, listen to it or watch it, and switch between them whenever you like. You can change the colour palette, the contrast, the size of the text, how much things move and how the audio behaves, as you go. In total there are 22 adaptive features, which add up to more than 100 different ways to experience the same story.

Three phones showing the same story in story mode, article mode and the visual settings menu (zoom, colour palette, image contrast, reduced motion).

The important bit is that blind and low-vision people were part of the design team, not just testers at the end.

The colour palette settings shown in a dark theme and a light theme, beside an illustrated staircase through a jungle.

Beautiful and accessible

What we set out to show was that beauty and accessibility aren’t mutually exclusive, once you learn how to make them play nicely together so they complement each other rather than compromise each other.

My part

I was tech director. I designed the architecture, led the development teams that built it, and was the technical point of contact for Google and the third parties involved. Building software for Google is, it turns out, as challenging as it sounds, but I learned a lot, and we hit our immovable deadline with all the core features in place.

Giving it away

Everything we learned went into the Accessibility Notebook, a public write-up of every technique, so anyone building for the web can borrow it. The point was never one beautiful site. It was to nudge web makers everywhere towards a more multi-sensory way of working.

What happened

  • 96% of testers said Auditorial vastly improved their experience.
  • It reached more than 100,000 readers and makers, and Google and the RNIB took inclusive design lectures based on it on tour.
  • It went on to win more than 25 awards, including a Silver Pencil at The One Show 2022 (Innovation in Radio & Audio), a Silver Cube at the ADC Awards 2022 (Publication Design: Innovation) and a Silver Clio in 2022. It was also recognised at the D&AD Awards 2022.
  • Google’s CEO shared it publicly.
  • It was one of the two projects named when I was given an R/GA Cube Award.

Some of what blind and low-vision testers said:

“It unlocks a whole different area of the internet that we were shut off from, for so long.”

“I hope developers use this project as a benchmark.”