What's Web Accessibility? What's PAS 78? Why Make Websites Accessible? Where did it all begin? What is the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Standard (WAI)? What is Web Accessibility? BOTTOM
Web Accessibility means making the web useable by everyone whatever their ability or disability.
What is PAS 78? BOTTOM
The new PAS 78 Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites guidelines sets out how to commission an accessible website. This new guide has been designed to ensure that websites that are new or being maintained are user-friendly for people who have disabilities. The report was created through consultation with a wide variety of advocacy groups including the DRC, RNIB, AbilityNet and the W3C.
Crucially, following the advice provided by the guide may demonstrate compliance by the website owner with the UK Disability Discrimination Act which requires websites to be accessible to people who are disabled.
PAS 78 establishes the steps that you need to follow to ensure your website accommodates the widest possible audience, dealing with the creation of an accessibility policy, the selection of web developers, and the vital role of user testing and maintenance.
Ecru has practical experience of working alongside AbilityNet to achieve web accessibility for both the Crown Prosecution Service and Disability Action in Islington, and we can bring this cutting edge experience to your web project.
Why Make Websites Accessible? TOP BOTTOM
According to W3C, the governing body of the World Wide Web, up to 20% of people are affected by some form of disability. A significant portion of people with disabilities can benefit from web sites specifically designed to be more accessible. In the US alone, there are currently estimated 52 million Americans who have cognitive, visual, hearing or physical disabilities which affect their ability to use computers and the Internet and the number is growing as people live longer. Even something as simple as the aging process - which affects us all, can make using websites significantly harder. Poor contrast between colours, small typefaces and unintuitive menu systems can make your website unreadable.
The 1995 Disability Discrimination Act has made it a legal requirement for companies and organisations to ensure that all can access their services and information. This act directly applies to websites and Internet services.
Increasing the accessibility of your online communications will:
- increase audience reach
- improve search engine listings
- reduce loads on your server
- reduce load on server bandwidth
- reduce site maintenance costs
- ensure your site complies with disability discrimination law
Where did it all begin? TOP
In its childhood, the internet was an explosion of weird and wonderful things, published by developers for developers, with little regard for end users. Soon however, the commercial value of a global medium became apparent, and consideration for user interfaces and layout became a concern for developers as building websites became a profession in its own right.
The new breed of websites were fed by corporate purses and published company identities, mission statements, and contact details, and used programming languages such as JavaScript to change the colour of buttons and make menus appear, disappear, collapse and expand. Designers were drafted in to make the sites look good, colours became less garish, software gadgetry was used more sparingly and content was written by "web authors".
By this time two main internet browsers had emerged as standard platforms for accessing websites, the main problem being that both differed largely in their approach to the delivery of web content. This meant developers had to either write code twice, one for each browser, or simply code for one type of browser over the other, hence the advent of subtle website disclaimers such as "optimized for xx browser" at the bottom of a homepage.
As the internet evolved once more, and the importance of visitor hits became paramount in the new field of internet marketing, developers were forced to code websites that would work in many versions of both of the main browsers, ensuring a greater number of hits to a website. More frustratingly for developers this also meant rewriting a generation of websites to work across several types of browser.
What is the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Standard (WAI)? TOP
The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Standard (WAI) is a set of guidelines that have been devised by the W3C to assist developers and lawmakers in the task of enforcing website accessibility.
Most accessibility legislation throughout the world directly follows the official Web Accessibility Initiative Standard , specifying the documents and the version number; others have written their own versions or combined these with general usability or best practices guidelines. An excellent and current source for legislation and guidelines in different countries can be found at www.w3.org.
W3C recommendation, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 became a W3C recommendation May 5, 1999 and explains accessible use of Web technologies for page authors and site developers. It has three priority levels and three conformance levels, 14 guidelines, and over 60 checkpoints all of which can be found at their website.
Source: World Wide Web Consortium www.w3c.org
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