Accessible web design - it matters!

Accessibility describes the process of making your website available to the widest possible audience. Accessibility makes good business sense, it gets your message across to the more people and it's also the law. Designing an attractive website is great, but you have to make sure that it can be navigated. Webyogi combines great design with W3C compliance on our websites. There's lots of information on the web about accessibility to start read the W3C Introduction to web accessibility.

Is accessibility relevant to you?
From October 2004, the Disability Discrimination Act, 1995 (DDA) requires service providers to ensure the web design they provide are accessible to people with disabilities. The DDA requirement applies to web design delivered through the web and to all businesses and all public sector organisations.

What are the benefits of Accessibility?

e-Accessibility benefits everyone so we'll also ensure that your website is legally compliant under the Disability Discrimination Act by making your web-site as accessible as possible: You open up your organisation to a far wider audience and to new potential customers

  • Better accessibility & positioning on search engines
  • Better accessibility for all users on all browsers
  • Better accessibility for the disabled
  • Smaller faster pages to download
  • Quick and easy to make future design changes to the site.

Accessibility and this website
We believe accessibility for all users is an important issue. This website has been designed to be:

  • W3C XHTML v1.0 validated
  • Better accessibility & positioning on search engines
  • W3C CSS v2.0 validated
  • W3C - WAI compliant to "AAA" standard
  • Keyboard shortcuts: Accessibility Keys

Watchfire Webxact
We build websites to conform to Watchfire Webxact testing for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues.

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. This web site has been designed to conform to W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 level AAA (the highest level).

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.

Accessibility levels
Legally, you achieve web accessibility determined on how your site measures up against the W3C-WAI standards. These standards point to 3 levels of web accessibility:

  • A - Which legally you must comply with.
  • AA - Which you should achieve; or your site will still be inaccessible to a large number of people.
  • AAA - Which should be aspired towards as far as is possible.

As well as building accessible websites, we can provide comprehensive accessibility reports on existing sites. We use automated tools like Cynthia Says as well as manual testing carried out entirely by real people. Key web design include....

  • web accessibility audit
  • accessibility testing
  • web accessibility training
  • ongoing accessibility help