Accessibility

Accessibility defines how users with disabilities can access electronic information, and how the web designer/developer can create web pages to overcome this obstacle and develop an accessible web application. The majority of disabled users who benefit from accessible websites are blind users; where they have various devices and software such as screen readers that will vocalize the content of a web page. There are a number of disabilities that need to be taken into consideration whilst designing a website, some examples include:

  • Blindness
  • Colour Blindness
  • Impaired Vision
  • Epilepsy
  • Dyslexic
  • Deafness
  • Language Limitations

The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 & Benefits

Under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, it’s a legal requirement to have your website accessible, in turn this provides many benefits to your organisation, for example:

  • Your website will be accessible to a wider audience.
  • Your website will work on multiple browsers and platforms, whilst maintaining usability without style sheets.
  • Updates to your website will be more efficient, hence less cost.

Our Current Standards

Ashby Web Design can provide you with content rich websites that are fully accessible for all users, regardless of their disabilities. As part of our service, all the websites we produce follow the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) guidelines established by the W3C, so there is no need for our clients to worry about accessibility.

What Ashby Web Design offers in terms of Accessibility

  • Strict XHTML & CSS coding to ensure all web pages work on many devices such as screen readers and Braille readers
  • WAI-AAA Accessibility Rating
  • No web page or piece of functionality is dependant on JavaScript
  • All JavaScript programming is unobtrusive
  • Alternative content is always produced for Flash content
  • Any use of background imagery, company logos etc will include alternative text for audio devices
  • All Content, Presentation and Behaviours are kept separate for device/user agent compatibility

Why Strict XHTML & CSS?

Strict XHTML ensures that the content within each web page is structured logically with no markup errors. Previous versions of HTML allowed web designers to produce content that may have looked fine, but never made logical sense if rendered by an audio reader device, a classic example was using tables for structural layout. A Valid Strict XHTML verification ensures that your web pages are structured correctly using the correct markup for each element and piece of information.

CSS since its arrival has benefited all users of the web, especially users with colour blindness and impaired vision. The use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allows any content of the web to be stylied with a specific font, size and colour. This functionality allows users with impaired vision to turn off the CSS to view web pages in just their text form, whilst allowing them to attach their own style sheet, such as increasing the font size.

Why Unobtrusive JavaScript?

Gaining a WAI-AAA Accessibility rating is only true when the Content (XHTML), Presentation (CSS) and behaviour (JavaScript) is kept separate. Separating XHTML and JavaScript has always been a difficult tasks because JavaScript requires event handlers such as keyboard and mouse events to trigger a piece of functionality. This technique intrudes on the content structure due to the device dependent events attached within the XHTML, which can cause problems with non-JavaScript devices, this is known as Obstrusive JavaScript. However Unobstrusive JavaScript attaches events dynamically without intruding on the XHTML, hence only devices with JavaScript enabled will incur the events; resulting in no runtime errors for user agents that may not support advanced JavaScript functionality.