Accessibility - A broad concept

The word "accessibility" is a broad concept and it is associated with different things depending on who you ask. It could for example be that it should be easy to find the right information, available co-workers, easy to get from point "A" to point "B", etc. Common to virtually everyone, however, is that we agree on that accessibility often is something positive. We want things to be easily accessible for us, that's why we invented cars, airplanes, internet, etc. For us at Meridium "accessibility" is a central core value that permeates throughout our business operations. Below you can take part of some of the definitions we add in the concept and what it means for our customers and partners.

An "available" supplier

Everyone know how frustrating it is trying to get a hold of someone or something you need but which turns out to be inaccessible or not available. It costs much time and energy. Therefore we place great importance on being a transparent company which is easy to get a hold of and talk to. As a very simple example we have, on virtually every page on our website, the opportunity to establish contact with us, resulting in minimized workload to contact us. Our idea is to always being available and listen to our customers needs and tailor our solutions according to that. Our projects always begins with a start-up meeting with the customer, followed by workshops and periodic reconciliations, which is based on the originator's need for interaction and follow-up. In order for everyone who are involved in the project to get ongoing information and an overview of what is to be done, the project management system Scrum is used. In Scrum the project is borken down into weekly work tasks scheduled in so-called "sprints". Our project philosophy is guided by a flexible approach and nothing is written in stone.

Accessible websites

In 2010, websites of public organizations are to meet EU's goals of being accessible to everyone, regardless of disabilities or technical limitations. For us at Meridium it is obvious that the websites' we deliver complies with W3C's guidelines for technical accessibility on the web. We think it's important with a information flow on the web, where everyone can participate no matter what conditions you have. It is also far more cost effective and less time consuming if you get it right from the beginning. In order to grasp this and make it easier to get it right from the begining we have developed SiteValidator, a quality assurance tool in that in real-time implements a number of tests to indicate whether there are deficiencies in any part of the technical accessibility of the site that is being developed. SiteValidator is, for partners to Meridium, free to use without any charge during the development period to the end customer. To strengthen and enhance the interest about web accessibility we at Meridium also created the service Validerat.se, which each week implements 16 different accessibility tests on the websites of public organizations and state-owned companies in Sweden.

Continuous improvement provides higher accessibility

In order to shorten our processes, avoid misunderstandings and increase the accessibility to relevant information, we are constantly making improvements. To capture existing improvement opportunities, we heavily rely on feedback from our stakeholders'. It could, for example, be little things such as to make downloading of old product versions possible, or moving the location of our price list on the website to a more logical place. It may also be major changes such as the development and introduction of our support and partner portal, where you, without intermediaries, can order and follow your service case, or as a partner order a product license. Within the frames of our service and support, there is always a dialogue between us and the customer and we dedicated resources in terms of having various people in team continuously working with service issues. The advantages of having different people working with service and support is that this generates a positive skill dissemination, which means that you're not dependent on one or two specific people to get the job done. 

The concept of accessibility includes, as we have seen above, a variety of definitions and it is not always crystal clear what it means when someone talks about it. Now, however, you have some indication of what the concept of accessibility means for us at Meridium and how our business operation is influenced by the concept to prevent precious time and energy to be spent on wrong things.