Web accessibility consulting
“I want a website that will…”
- comply with accessibility guidelines and not breach disability discrimination legislation;
- meet my corporate social responsibility obligations;
- reach a wider market;
- reach beyond disabled people;
- be more efficient, cost-effective, search engine friendly and usable.
Background
In the UK, the right of disabled people to have access to the web is enshrined in the legislation of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) of 1995. In particular, the Code of Practice for Section III of the DDA, which refers to websites, was published on 27th May 2002, making it law.
Website owners in virtually all countries have a legal obligation not to discriminate against people with disabilities. And given that something like 15% of the population have some sort of disability, that’s a sizeable market proportion. If you’re not reaching them, your competitors probably are.
Web accessibility consulting is just part of Egn’s website design and development service.
Egn Webcraft can help you with…
Navigation: Should be capable of being skipped by screen readers or people who are using the tab key instead of a mouse.
Headers: Should be semantically correct and hierarchical to enable screen reader page navigation.
Links: Should indicate the purpose and destination of the link. They should not be identified by colour alone.
Images: Should either have meaningful, concise alternative text or explicit null text if they do not convey information.
Audio: Should have transcripts available.
Colour: Should not be used on its own to convey information. There should always be sufficient contrast between text colour and background colour.
Forms: Should be logically structured. Labels should be correctly associated with fields.
Tables: Should be correctly marked up so that screen readers can associate columns and rows with headers.
Image maps: Should be client side only and marked with meaningful alternative text.
Flicker: Text should not blink or automatically scroll. Animated imagery should have a flicker frequency of less than 2 Hz or more than 55 Hz.
Validation: All pages should validate to at least WCAG 1.0 A guidelines, but preferably to double-A or triple-A guidelines.
Readability: Check Gunning Fog and Flesch Kincaid scores.
