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Accessible Transportation

The Situation

GRTC Transit System, owned jointly by the City of Richmond and Chesterfield County, has proudly operated continuously, with one temporary suspension of service during the Civil War, since 1860.  Their success is largely in part because of their progressive attitude over the years.  They were the first transit agency to adopt system-wide use of electric streetcars, and today, they strive to anticipate the service improvement needs of all their riders.  This includes making sure their services are attractive and accessible for riders with disabilities.

Our Approach

The LCI team is providing on-going semiannual accessibility monitoring after conducting accessibility testing and sharing recommendations for improvements to the website.  Based on our accessibility testing and monitoring, we found several issues on the pages of the GRTC website and route maps.  They were:

  • Disorganized Heading Structure – make it difficult to understand the overall outline of the page.
  • Graphical representations of text – non-visual users miss out on important content.
  • Automatic cycling carousel – can be distracting for low-vision users.
  • Links and images with no descriptive test – make it difficult for screen reader users to identify the purpose of the link or image.
  • Ambiguous form labels – make it difficult for screen reader users to figure out what to input into the form.

The Result

LCI Tech provided a comprehensive report including recommendations on how to remediate the issues, as well as a follow-up demonstration of some of the key problems with the website where GRTC was able to ask questions and clarify any misunderstandings after reviewing LCI Tech’s report. GRTC is currently working with its web developer to execute our recommendations to resolve these issues.