Accessible Website Design
Website Accessibility means taking reasonable steps to make websites available to people of all abilities and disabilities, especially people with visual impairments (including blindness, poor eyesight and colour blindness).
Accessible website design and development helps you to stay within the law, and makes your website available to the widest possible audience, which is why we believe that website accessibility is an important consideration for every new project. To speak with us about accessible website development please call us now on 0141 424 3408.
Accessibility Law
In the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) made discrimination against against people with disabilities illegal, and the DDA states that anyone providing a service must take reasonable steps to make sure the service is accessible to all.
Failing to make reasonable adjustments for accessibility could theoretically lead to legal action, though as of yet no test case has been brought under UK law. By contrast, legal action has successfully been taken in Australia, in 1999, by Bruce Maguire. The complaint focused on the lack of certain accessibility features in parts of the Sydney Olympics website, produced by IBM on behalf of the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games. The same principle would likely apply in the UK should a case be brought under the DDA provision.
Accessible Website Design
In practical terms, accessible website design guidelines are fairly consistent with good website design practice. The general principle of accessible web site design is that disabled users might rely on alternative input and output devices for web browsing (eg screen reader software and keyboard navigation), or may wish to modify the visual aspects of web browsing (eg text size and screen colours).
To fully achieve accessible web design, new websites should therefore use HTML markup and CSS stylesheets properly, provide text alternatives for image content, adhere to the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, allow people to change the font size using their web browser, use underlined links and contrasting colours, not rely on colour to provide information, allow keyboard-only navigation, use plain language where possible, and more.
More information is available from the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [ http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/ ], and from the Web Accessibility Initiative [ http://www.w3.org/WAI/ ]
Accessible Web Design in Glasgow
If you are looking for accessible web designers in Glasgow, give us a call to discuss your project on 0141 424 3408.
Glasgow Web Design strive to make all reasonable efforts to produce accessible web design, and we will advise you on how to ensure that your website is available to the widest audience. We offer accessible web design in Scotland and throughout the UK and Ireland.
