Zoneix Web Design and Development

Why accessibility is important to you

If you don't want to exclude potential customers you need to address accessibility in your web site design. Will it display in a text based browser? Can it work with a screen reader? What about an older computer with an older browser?. Then there is the law, have you considered The Disability Discrimination Act?

The Disability Discrimination Act and Web Sites

Part III of the Disability Discrimination Act refers to the provision of goods, facilities and services, and whilst it doesn't mention web sites explicitly, it doesn't mention any services explicitly. If you do business on the web the act affects you.

The Government has produced the Publicly Available Specification or PAS 78 for accessible web design. This sets out the standards a web site should meet in order to comply with the act. The publication is available in various electronic formats at The Equality and Human Rights Commission web site

The Royal National Institute for the Blind publish guidelines based on the Act and suggest the standard to be achieved.

At RNIB, as outlined in our “See it Right” web site accessibility requirements, we recommend that web sites exceed the basic level of compliance that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend in their Web site Content Accessibility Guidelines (WAG) version 1.0 and aim for Double AA compliance.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

WCAG are the most important accessibility guidelines for web commissioners to be aware of, as they are considered to be the de facto standard for accessible web design (PAS 78).

WCAG comprises a set of checkpoints ranked into three conformance levels, with priorities 1, 2 or 3, according to W3C WAI’s view of their relative importance in enabling web access. Conformance with all the checkpoints in a conformance level (and those above it) qualifies a site for the designation Conformance Level A, AA or AAA.

When Zoneix design web site's we follow the Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines detailed by the WC3.

Zoneix are committed to producing web sites that pass automated testing to meet accessibility guidelines. We use the "Cynthia Says" testing portal. Cynthia is a web content accessibility validation solution, it is designed to identify errors in design related to Section 508 standards and the WCAG guidelines.

Read more about the W3C WAI suggestions on web accessibility

Why standards based design is important to you

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have some guidance for customers when selecting a web design company.

Reproduced in part from the W3C web site article on W3C Quality Assurance. Read the full article here.

Open Standards for the Web

Ignored for a long time by many developers, standards such as HTTP, HTML or XML are at the very core of the success of the Web. The current trend of stressing standards compliance on the Web is not due to chance: they are a win-win for all participants.

Developed by experts and with input from the whole Web community, standards work together to provide the foundation to build increasingly powerful applications. Standards are the result of a lot of energy and expertise and are available for free: don't miss the opportunity to benefit from their leveraging effect!

For a more powerful Web site

On the Web, being up-to-date with the latest technologies is a difficult exercise: choosing the wrong tool or architecture can lead to losses in money, time, or customers.

By using standards, your Web site's foundation is built upon technologies that have been developed and tested by leading experts in the Web community. For example, the W3C Process ensures that a technology reaching its last state of development has been implemented into several compatible products. With almost 500 companies and organizations from the IT world contributing R&D efforts to the production of W3C standards, these standards are truly the leading edge of the Web.

Standards organizations, like the W3C, build a consensus among these groups and experts to maintain and develop consistent architectural principles. Groups such as the Technical Architecture Group at W3C make sure that technologies can be combined nicely, building a Web coherent with the decisions that allowed the Web to grow so quickly.

Orienting your choices toward standards means getting the latest innovations, but only those that are solid enough to gather consensus, and hence, the technologies that are here to stay.

Reduced maintenance costs

Everything goes very fast on the Web, and maintaining a Web site can imply fairly big operational costs. Without a compliant Web site, migrating to new platforms and adding functionalist to your applications can be expensive operations.

However, if your applications are developed on open standards, your applications won't depend on a unique provider:

• you won't be stuck with formats you don't have access to;
• you can influence how the standards are developed; and
• you can benefit from the best backward- and even forward-compatibility.

Have you ever had difficulties re-using existing code produced by a former provider? Even if you haven't, you can be sure that anything developed for a unique product ("browser X is the most popular, why bother with the others?") or using non-standard technologies won't scale with time and your needs, which means that it will cost a lot to maintain.

Because standards are built to be combined, developing new applications from an existing base is much easier: the tools to manipulate open technologies get more sophisticated, more numerous, and more powerful all the time.

Finally, standards usually avoid the infamous feature creep of other formats and clearly separate orthogonal applications: using CSS lets you cleanly separate the presentation from the structure of your data. This very same separation also saves in the operational costs: using CSS means less HTML code for each page, and therefore bandwidth saving.

Benefit from accessibility designs

Making a Web site accessible is both beneficial and challenging:

• beneficial because it broadens your potential audience and makes it much more usable for everyone — some level of accessibility is also required by law in a growing number of countries; and
• challenging because it requires thorough designing and testing to address diverse issues.

Thanks to various efforts (the Web Accessibility Initiative for instance), accessibility has been integrated into an important number of standards, either natively or by using techniques specifically designed for them. Using standards technologies lets you benefit directly from design decisions that have been tested by the Web community and are complemented by a large set of tools.

Accept only the best

Zoneix are committed to working to Web Standards

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