Website Accessibility

In the UK, disability laws now require web site owners to take reasonable steps to ensure that their site is available to everyone. The UK Disability Discrimination Act applies to websites, and thanks to the Disability Rights Commission, its being actively enforced. This has driven website accessibility design. We have experience of developing and redesigning web sites in accordance with the recommendations of W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

New York State's Attorney General announced settlements with two major travel websites in 2004. In both instances the companies had failed to implement guidelines published by the W3C that could have ensured online accessibility for people with disabilities.

In the UK the RNIB say that they've considered taking up a number of legal cases against organisations with regard to their websites - and the DRC promise to be "vigorous in the use of our enforcement powers" when sites ignore their duty to provide a basic level of accessibility.

We design websites that are accessible to a range of users with disabilities. Our websites can be designed to be compliant with:

Valid HTML/XHTML - as defined by
W3C (www.w3.org)
Sitemorse (www.sitemorse.com)

Valid CSS - as defined by W3C (www.w3.org)
Disability accessibility - as defined by the W3C WAI (www.w3.org/WAI/)

Accessible content - as:
defined by the W3C WCAG (www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/)
recommended by Watchfire (www.watchfire.com)
recommended by the RNIB (www.rnib.org.uk)
recommended by the government (www.disability.org)

The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative site contains an incredible collection of important and valuable information
www.w3.org/WAI/

Published W3C documents
The W3C has released new working drafts of both the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, and the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0.

New draft of WCAG 2.0 
www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-WCAG20-20051123/

New draft of ATAG 2.0 
www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-ATAG20-20051123/

RNIB Web Access Centre
www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/code/public_rnib008789.hcsp

W3C Markup Validation Service
validator.w3.org

Bobby compliance

Created by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities

WebXACT is a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues.
http://webxact.watchfire.com/