The Tipton St John charity Word Forest has announced an initiative to make its website content accessible to people with visual impairment.

It has set a goal to upload audio recordings of all 457 articles in its newsfeed by World Sight Day, October 12.

Word Forest is an international charity working to reverse deforestation in Kenya through empowering women and facilitating education. It is constantly looking to improve how it conveys stories about the climate emergency.

According to the Government UK Health Security Agency, 11 million people have partial or total inability to hear and, according to the Royal National Institute for the Blind, two million people in the UK live with sight loss.

With this in mind, Word Forest wants to ensure that everyone can access information on how to live sustainably and better help the environment. This will add to the current accessibility features available on its website, such as different contrast and typeface options.

Head of IT and co-founder of Word Forest, Simon West, said: “Creating audio recordings of every page and blog article on our website is an absolutely enormous task, but we feel it is vital to make our important message available to all.”

The charity’s CEO and other co-founder, Tracey West, understands personally how necessary electronic accessibility measures like these are. Tracey was born deaf in one ear and has more recently been troubled with aggressive cataracts. She has experienced how isolated a person can feel when they have hearing loss or a major visual impairment.

“Struggling to hear adequately has been a life-long challenge… my hearing is deteriorating and [Simon] wears two hearing aids” she explained, adding: “Learning how to cope with ongoing, worsening sight has been unbelievably debilitating.

“Looking at stuff on the internet was a nightmare. Now I’m rising up from a year of darkness and I need to ensure that Word Forest’s storytelling abilities are as good as they can be.”

Last month, Word Forest was named as a recipient of the NatWest SE100 award. The award recognises those in the social enterprise sector for their sustainable practices and commitment to social impact.

The Word Forest team revealed that they took a sample of 60 per cent of the other SE100 recipients to examine what electronic accessibility features they offered. None of them offered any options for visually impaired readers.

Simon said: “For developers to make websites accessible, it can be as simple as a couple of clicks and some configuration settings. It’s disheartening to find that so few seem to pay any attention to this.

“People have been talking about accessibility for ages, and there is no doubt that some things have improved. My experience supporting Tracey and some of our volunteers with vision problems is that not enough has been done. I am proud to lead this pioneering charge to making our site fully accessible. I hope it goes on to inspire other organisations to follow our lead!”