Accessible web design
Accessibility is the term used to describe the process of making your web site available to the widest possible audience.
Watchfire Webxact - We build web sites to conform to Watchfire Webxact testing for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues.
Accessibility has benefits!
Ensuring compliance with these standards has many benefits:
- Better positioning on search engines
- Better accessibility for all users on all browsers
- Better accessibility for the disabled (inline with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995)
- Smaller faster pages to download
- Quick and easy to make future design changes to the site.
W3C-WAI
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was created in October 1994 to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential, partly by creating some common standards to ensure interoperability. This commitment includes promoting a high degree of usability for people with disabilities.
The 'Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0' (WCAG) is a W3C specification providing guidance on accessibility of Web sites for people with disabilities. Developed by the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C-WAI), the specification contains fourteen guidelines which are general principles of accessible design. These guidelines not only make pages more accessible to people with disabilities, they make them more accessible to all users, including those using different technologies to view the pages.