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The Disability Discrimination Act now legally requires websites to be accessible to all users (both disabled and non-disabled) across all browser technologies.

A common misconception is that an accessible site is more expensive and can restrict design creativity. The fact is that accessibility does not need to impact upon design at all. We can help your company build a visually creative site that not only achieves all your site objectives in terms of functionality and design, but that also fulfils your legal responsibility. Additionally, there is no cost disadvantage to building an accessible site, in fact it could end up saving you money in the long term and even help you increase revenue through:

• Increasing your customer reach
• Facilitating easier and more cost effective site maintenance
• Ensuring compatibility with new technologies
• Enhancing usability
• Producing higher search engine rankings
• Improving positive brand associations

But what exactly is an accessible site?

An accessible site means ensuring your site is available to those users with visual, hearing, mobility or cognitive impairments and that it is viewable over different formats such as a Safari browser, handheld devices, over slow internet connections etc. It also means considering people using screen readers, screen magnifiers, who suffer from colour blindness or navigate through the site using only the keyboard or voice activated software. Transcripts of any audio content must also be provided for hearing impaired users.

Current Accessibility Benchmarks

The current benchmark for accessibility standards is the WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 which provides a detailed list of what must be completed to achieve each level of compliance. A website can attempt compliance to one of three levels - A, AA and AAA. As levels AA and AAA are progressively more difficult to support, companies often have to make a trade-off between compliance and cost.

• Level A is widely considered the minimum for legal compliance.
• Smaller websites are best suited to A - AA.
• For corporate or public sector companies AA is considered best practice.

We aim for AA accessibility compliance, with a guaranteed minimum of A.

Related Internet sites

• BBC blog: Disibility Bitch (external link)
• Disability Rights Commission (DRC) - Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 78 (external link)
• WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (external link)
• Wikipedia: PAS 78 (external link)

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