Accessibilty Background
W3C Web Standards
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a diverse collection of important
figures within the internet world - technology developers, content providers,
corporate users, research laboratories, standards bodies, and governments, all
of whom endeavour to apply a set of guidelines to the way that websites are
designed and maintained in order to ensure that web site content is available
to the largest possible number of users, regardless of how they view they
browse the web, what tools they use and whether they have any disability.
As a means to exact these guidelines upon web developers the W3C has developed
a site validation service, which tests websites files for conformance to the
W3C recommendations. This validation service is offered for XHTML (The file
type we use to bring a site’s content to your internet browser) and CSS (The
file which integrates our design into the ‘code’ behind your website), all of
our websites will comply with this validation and as such be some way towards
providing a fully accessible web design.
Accessibility Why does my site need to be accessible? An accessible website
(W3C/WAI) has
a huge number of advantages – Blind users may utilise a screen reader which
uses speech synthesis to read out a web site’s content, valid XHTML design
means that this will work the way that the software intends. Partially sighted
visitors will need to increase the size of the text on your website and valid
CSS design will be needed to allow this to happen. Deaf visitors and those with
no mouse access along with web users with Colour Blindness and even Epilepsy
are also considered.
It is not just Disabled users who benefit from accessibility, visitors with
PDA’s, mobile devices, WebTV and even slow connections will benefit from an
accessible website – the most important benefit however is that of automatic
search engine optimisation, engines such as Google use a ‘spider’ technique in
which their software crawls through pages looking for meaningful content.
Search engine spiders do not see design and need accessible navigation to trawl
through each page on your site, a valid website will allow this and instantly
improve your sites position.
The benefits are clear, complying to web standards guidelines ensures that
websites are accesible by the widest range of people and are designed for the
future.