The Disability and the Equality Act, formerly the Disability Discrimination Act 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 and over slow internet connections. Transcripts of any audio content should also be provided for hearing impaired users.
Current Accessibility Benchmarks
The current benchmark for accessibility standards is the WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 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.
Every project is considered individually but as a guide we aim for AA accessibility compliance, with a guaranteed minimum of A. If required, we can work with you to acheive AAA.
