Creating a modern digital service for RNIB Bookshare

About the client

RNIB Bookshare is a service run by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), the UK’s leading sight loss charity. RNIB is a force for social change, supporting blind and partially sighted people, changing public perceptions, and helping make a world that is more accessible.

RNIB believes in accessibility by default, since it’s better for everyone.

About RNIB Bookshare

Launched in 2011, RNIB Bookshare provides educational books and materials in accessible formats for students with vision impairment, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and autism that affect their ability to read educational materials in print format.

It is a vital resource for many students and teachers, promoting equal opportunities in education.

There are over 1.3 million books from 1,300 publishers available online. The service supports more than 70,000 students in over 15,000 schools, colleges and universities.

Project challenges

The RNIB Bookshare website was based on the Drupal 7 platform, which is legacy technology and needed to be replaced by January 2025.

With support from People’s Postcode Lottery, RNIB were able to invest in the sustainability of the service and develop a platform that’s fit for the future.

A key challenge was to replace this complex digital service, ensure it is fully accessible, and have a smooth transition to the new service for its users, including 70,000 students and 47,000 staff.

Multiple systems needed to be considered as part of this project; it was essential to design an architecture that worked efficiently for RNIB staff and the learners who rely on this service.

Data was an important aspect of the project. Given that many users are young students, clearly understanding where data is held and ensuring proper governance and data privacy was essential.

Collaboration

We worked with many stakeholders and external partners on this project across multiple time zones.

External teams we collaborated with included:

• Benetech, the US-based tech for good organisation who provide the API for books
• Dolphin, the Sweden-based technology company who provide the mobile app EasyReader (used by many learners to access RNIB Bookshare)
• Torchbox, the digital agency that created the RNIB Design System

We helped bridge the many technical and commercial challenges and explained with clarity how the existing system worked and what RNIB needed for the new platform.

We worked very closely with the Bookshare team at RNIB, as well as liaising with the technical teams at RNIB, and senior stakeholders to ensure the solution met their standards.

We approached the project with an open and collaborative mindset, and we had shared goals to make the RNIB Bookshare project a success.

A dedicated digital product

The Discovery phase involved a lot of research, analysis, and testing the technical feasibility of the original plan.

We concluded that building a custom web application built on the popular open source framework Laravel would be the most flexible way to meet RNIB’s needs and deliver a forward-looking platform.

The system was made up of a few component parts:

• Data import and cleaning
• Book search
• Book download
• User management and data management in Laravel
• Case management for customer service
• Page content management in Craft CMS
• Headless CMS to deliver CMS content to the web app
• API to deliver content to third parties

By building a custom digital product for RNIB we were able to tailor this to their needs, making changes as we iterated the web app and bringing real value to the client.

A truly accessible solution

Often, the accessibility of back-end admin systems is forgotten about and rarely meets accessibility standards. This excludes people from managing the service and for RNIB this is essential since 20% of their staff have a visual disability.

We built the admin system in the Laravel web app to be fully accessible, customising admin screens to ensure they are tailored for the business tasks RNIB have to do. We chose Craft CMS specifically due to its commitment to accessibility.

The Studio 24 team believes in creating a web for everyone. Working together with RNIB to improve the accessibility of the platform is a great example of our shared goals and the strong partnership we developed during this project.

Improved workflow for the RNIB team

We worked on a number of features that helped improve the workflow for RNIB staff to make their life easier.

We built a case management tool that replaced a clunky and complex Salesforce system, which was used to manage incoming service queries.

After careful planning to review the best approach, we built a case management system in Laravel, which was tailored to exactly how the RNIB Bookshare team works.

This increased staff efficiency and gave users simple and effective ways to get support from RNIB.

We were able to customise this to capture only the information RNIB needed, which simplified the system and resulted in an easy-to-user case management service for RNIB staff.

Seamless transition from the old website to the new

With thousands of users relying on the RNIB Bookshare service, a big part of the project was to ensure a seamless transition.

Our mantra throughout the project was ‘evolution not revolution’. We used the RNIB Design System (based on the excellent GOV.UK Design System) to keep a familiar look and feel with the main RNIB website, extending and adapting this as required for the project and to make small improvements such as increasing the click area for buttons.

A common area of friction on a website relaunch is the login process. We planned the launch carefully with RNIB. We created automated processes to migrate user data across to the new platform. We designed a first-time user login process to guide users to log in to the new platform. Learner users were able to authenticate against the legacy platform and set their password on the new platform. This made the process straightforward.

For users with administrative access, we guided them to create a new password for enhanced security.

A robust service fit for the future

Together, RNIB and Studio 24 have built a modern digital service that makes curriculum texts accessible so all learners can study equally alongside their peers, learn independently, and reach their full potential.

Delivering over 1.3 million titles quickly and reliably, Bookshare helps educators focus on students instead of searching for or adapting materials, so learning is prioritised.

Teacher workload is reduced as they can use Bookshare to request books, create reading lists, and download usage reports to be reassured that learners are accessing relevant material.

With the new robust platform in place, Bookshare will continue to be a big part of RNIB’s future and how they support learners across the UK.