Accessible web site design

You should be aware that the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 1995 requires that service providers (in this case your company) take reasonable measures to ensure that their offering is accessible to all. This legislation extends to websites.

You will be reassured to know that websites we design adhere to Priority 1/level A of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.  This standard means that your website achieves the first level of compliance in accordance with the DDA.

If you wish us to take measures to further increase the accessibility of the site, e.g. ensure adherence to Priority 2/level AA of the guidelines, please discuss this with us as we will be pleased to provide compliance.

Standards compliance

Website construction standards’ adherence is important from another perspective, that of platform and browser compatibility.  By adhering to standards, we are better able to ensure that your website will present itself similarly in a variety of situations e.g. on a Macintosh or IBM compatible computer, in Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox etc.

When constructing websites we adhere to the very strict standards laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), namely XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2.0.  This compliance provides the following additional benefits to you and your website users:

• XHTML websites are more ‘search engine friendly’ as web pages contain less code and the content sits higher on the page
• because of the way the site is coded, content changes and website updating prove faster and therefore less expensive for you in the longer term
• as the pages created using XHTML contain less code, your website will load faster for your visitors, leaving them with a feeling that they are browsing a high quality website

To discuss your accessible and standards compliant website needs, call us now on 0845 123 5636 or complete our enquiry form.