Accessibility

Accessibility means that a broad range of people, including users with disabilities, can visit and use your online content and services. Part III of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) makes it unlawful for a service provider to treat disabled people less favourably for a reason related to their disability. We therefore advise our clients to consider making reasonable adjustments to the way that they deliver their services where disabled people find these impossible or unreasonably difficult to access.

There are many ways of making your website more accessible, and we would work with you to define the most appropriate measures. 

Digit Hill recommends that all websites comply with at least Priority One of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Priority A Standard, and Priority Two and Three (“AA” and “AAA” respectively), as required. As standard, all our sites comply with Priority One ("A").  

Other than meeting an organisation’s legal and social responsibility to achieve an appropriate level of accessibility, many other business benefits can be derived through our production of an accessible site:

- Improved Search Engine listings

- Reduced site maintenance

- Site Search Improvements, meaning that users will find things on your site more efficiently

- Assisting access for low-bandwidth users, so that your site is not restricted to broadband users

- Increase support for Internationalisation, broadening your organisation’s market or audience

- Reuse the same content for multiple formats or devices (e.g. mobile phones), maximising the value of content assets within your organisation

- Better enables computers and people to work in cooperation (XML Web services)

- Address server-load and bandwidth, optimising the performance of your system

There are several key factors that need to be considered to ensure that a web site is considered socially inclusive. Through its Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) the W3C has published a list of quick tips which should be used to produce web pages that are truly accessible. 

- Images & animations. Use the alt attribute to describe the function of each visual

- Image maps. Use the client-side map and text for hotspots 

- Multimedia. Provide captioning and transcripts of audio, and descriptions of video

- Hypertext links. Use text that makes sense when read out of context. For example, avoid "click here." 

- Page organisation. Use headings, lists, and consistent structure. Use CSS for layout and style where possible

- Graphs & charts. Summarise or use the longdesc attribute

- Scripts, applets, & plug-ins. Provide alternative content in case active features are inaccessible or unsupported

- Frames. Use the noframes element and meaningful titles

- Tables. Make line-by-line reading sensible

- Check your work. Validate. Use tools, checklist, and guidelines at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG  

Our aim is to follow and support the ever changing recommendation's of the WAI, to ensure that all our client's sites remain universally accessible.