Accessibility has become a very important feature of any website, and is paramount when providing a web site service today. On the 1st of October 2004, the final part of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) came into force, and specifically included websites providing products or services. This means that if your website does not provide adequate facilities to enable disabled users to access your content, then your business or organisation could be liable for prosecution.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

In order to help website owners and designers publish accessible websites, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) were developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to ensure that critical information on your website is accessible to as many users as possible. These guidelines have three levels of accessibility;

• Priority 1 (Level "A"):
  A Web content developer must satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use Web documents.
• Priority 2 (Level "Double A"):
  A Web content developer should satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will remove significant barriers to accessing Web documents.
• Priority 3 (Level "Triple A"):
  A Web content developer may address this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it somewhat difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will improve access to Web documents.

Accessible Web Design & Development

Creating websites with standards compliant code and following these guidelines will increase the size of your audience. For example, visually impaired users will be able to access your content when using text only browsers or assistive technologies such as screen reading software. Another added benefit, is that your website will be easier for search engines to crawl and could improve your search engine rankings.

Vibe Creative develops websites in accordance with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines ensuring our sites adhere to the latest DDA legislation. Using the latest web technology we aim to implement websites that pass at least Double-A conformance. This also includes content generated dynamically by our content management system. Our CMS will generate standards compliant web pages using W3C valid XHTML and CSS.

For more information on our content management system and our web development, call us on 0845 263 7989 or email Studio@VibeCreative.co.uk