RHP was Highly Commended in the Customer Services category of the Housing Technology Awards 2026. Gareth Levingston, RHP’s head of technology, explains about the housing provider’s redevelopment of its accessible website.
A housing provider’s website should help people get things done calmly, confidently and without needing a phone call as the backup plan. In 2025, we rebuilt our website as a modern, inclusive digital ‘front door’ for our customers and other stakeholders such as investors and job candidates, with accessibility as a top priority.
When the front door sticks
At RHP, our purpose is to provide safe, secure homes, and opening the door to life opportunities. Our website is often the quickest route for customers to pay rent, report repairs and find the right support. When it works, it’s quietly helpful. When it doesn’t, customers lose time and confidence and we end up back where we started, on the phone.
Our discovery sessions surfaced a blunt truth – some customers didn’t trust our website to get them to an answer. One comment captured it perfectly: “The website doesn’t tell me what I need to know or give me a clear idea of what to do so I’m just going to give them a call.”
However, a new website isn’t a thrilling proposition on its own. Our approach was different in that we treated accessibility as a human experience, not a final compliance check. That meant listening early and testing often with customers, and building accessibility into the foundations so that it stays protected as the website evolves.
Designing for real life
Working with Great State, our digital partner, we redesigned the information structure, content and key journeys to reduce mental effort (what it takes to figure out what to do), improve findability and get things done without support.
Our project included discovery and co-design, user experience and content design, a visual refresh and a full rebuild using a headless content management system, Umbraco Heartcore. It separates content from presentation, giving us better editorial control and scalability.
We used Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at the highest ‘AAA’ level as the key constraint behind strategy, content, design and build, intentionally going beyond the legal baseline so that it works for customers with the greatest barriers and therefore works better for everyone.
In practice, accessibility was lots of small things done consistently: clearer navigation and language, predictable page patterns, keyboard access end-to-end and forms with visible labels, help text and clear error messages. We also designed for openness and calm: an accessibility-compliant palette, an accessible user-selected font, inclusive photography, signpost-style illustrations and a more conversational tone.
Keeping the customers in the room
We organised our testing to make sure our customers were included and engaged. They completed real tasks, including scenarios that relied on assistive technology and scenarios where confidence was low and the journey needed to be especially clear. Their feedback directly shaped navigation, content clarity, form help and error messaging.
What changed
Our definition of success was simple: enable customers to self-serve with confidence, find information fast, resolve problems independently and, where self-service isn’t appropriate, be clearly signposted to the right support.
The primary benefit is a more inclusive, lower-stress experience. Clearer language and consistent patterns reduce uncertainty; customers are guided through journeys using clear steps and explicit expectations. This improves ‘psychological safety’ and reduces the likelihood of customers abandoning their journeys due to confusion or loss of trust.
From a technology perspective, we replaced restrictive templates with reusable components, so that improvements can be delivered faster and more safely. And accessibility is now repeatable: once a component is proven accessible, it can be reused consistently without reintroducing known problems.
The website also supports corporate transparency and partner engagement through improved signposting and structured access to organisational information, including a dedicated investor hub.
Human-level innovation
Our innovation was to treat accessibility as the primary product requirement, not a compliance tick box. By designing to WCAG 2.2 AAA, we embedded inclusive patterns into every layer, information architecture, content, interaction design, brand and build, creating an experience that reduces mental effort and supports independent completion.
Technically, we combined Umbraco Heartcore with an accessible component approach using Ark UI so that once a pattern is verified for structure, keyboard navigation, focus behaviour, error handling and screen-reader behaviour, it can be reused safely across the entire service.
How we measured it
Our quantitative goals were measurable accessibility outcomes: align with WCAG 2.2 AAA, enable keyboard-only completion of priority tasks, ensure assistive-technology compatibility through predictable structure and clear form labelling, and standardise accessible patterns so new journeys don’t degrade accessibility over time.
A key qualitative goal was customer trust. As mentioned earlier, our discovery sessions surfaced the problem clearly: “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t trust it”. Post-launch feedback showed improved confidence: “It’s straightforward. I like the stepped process and things I can try before calling RHP” and “I like the fact I can filter the content that is suitable to me.”
What would we tell our peers?
If there’s one takeaway for other housing providers, it’s this: accessibility isn’t a final check before launch. It is a design principle, a delivery discipline and a promise to customers that the digital front door will work when they need it to.
Yes, we rebuilt a website. The more important part is that we now have a calmer, more consistent and more sustainable foundation, shaped by customer input throughout, designed to remain accessible as our online services evolve.
Gareth Levingston is the head of technology at RHP. The housing provider was Highly Commended in the Customer Services category at the Housing Technology Awards 2026.
