The platform recommends personalized sustainable challenges, habits and product options, with actions that can be taken daily.
Two of every three Americans want a simple way to take action on climate change, but don’t know where to start, who to trust or how to find sustainable products and services. Based on models of planned user growth, application usage can achieve over 2.5M tons of averted emissions and 2.5M tons of removed carbon over first 4 years of application usage. Bringing the best practices from behavioral modification applications to the consumer sustainability space allows us to create something novel and unique.
The customizable nature of this platform makes it a unique and effective tool for organizations working to educate and drive action on sustainability. Communities, companies, campuses, and other organizations with clear climate and sustainability goals can use this platform to reach more individuals. The app provides them with a curated roadmap to build better habits and work toward collective goals.
Emerald Technology Group will be working with Ecolibrium3 in Duluth, along with other regional partners, to develop a pilot in support of the Duluth Citizens’ Climate Action Plan.
The partners will work together to develop a customized version of the Emerald GetGreen mobile application, providing a gamified engaging application to extend the reach of the Duluth Citizens’ Climate Action Plan.
Through promotion and use of the app, hundreds of local individuals will be introduced to the Climate Action Plan and provide them with a daily activity to support the goals of the plan.
Daily activities include actions in support of local and lower carbon transportation and transit options, local food, composting and waste reduction, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and other efforts to reduce climate impacts through individual behaviors and advocacy.
The GetGreen app uses personalized actions and challenges to put easy to understand sustainable solutions in consumers’ pockets. Examples include energy home energy reduction, more efficient transportation, food and dining and sustainable product options.
A gamified credit reward system allows users to earn “Green Leaves” and keeps them highly engaged using proven behavioral modification approaches. As well, a patent pending smart location aware system provides “right time, right place” instant notifications to users of nearby sustainable actions options and choices. A full set of administrative tools allow partners such as companies, universities, municipalities and utilities to program and recommend specific sustainable actions to consumers. Finally, a personalized, customizable communication platform provides targeted messaging to employees or end users.
The application is available on both iOS and Android mobile devices.”
Grid Catalyst
We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email nina@gridcatalyst.org
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all of the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside of it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users.
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs, there may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to nina@gridcatalyst.org