Accessibility, Usability & Compliance
Accessibility, Usability & Compliance
How to make your Web site work for you. 2nd April - Liverpool.
We are proud to announce that the sdesign1 web site has recently been awarded the accessites 'Quality Universal Design' award.
'This is a major achievement and vindication of our belief in three things: Users, users and users'
says Phil Smears, Director of sdesign1.
The standards required for this award are very, very exacting. Amongst other things, sdesign1 had to ensure the following Accessites requirements were met:
- Mark-up & CSS
- The site must be written to a “strict” DOCTYPE and must be valid.
- Valid CSS must be used for presentation. No layout tables, please.
- The site must meet all the mechanical checks for WCAG 1.0 Priority 1.
- Text must be resizable in all modern browsers.
- The site must be viewable in an 800 x 600 resolution monitor without side-scrolling.
- Semantically correct elements must be used properly. No breaks used to make lists, etc.
- Without CSS support, the site must linearize effectively and logically.
- Graceful Degradation & Progressive Enhancement
- The site must remain functional if images are disabled.
- Primary site features must work without JavaScript or access to other plugins.
- Security, such as form security, must be backed up with server-side validation.
- Links & Linking
- Links must be clearly distinguishable and easy to activate.
- Hover styles must not depend on colour changes alone.
- Where appropriate, links must be properly separated or make use of list markup.
- Keyboard Navigation
- The site must be easy to navigate without a mouse.
- Links and form controls must offer focus/active visual changes.
- If employed, tab indexing must be logical and intuitive.
- Effective skip links must be available to both sighted and visually impaired users.
- Visitor Support
- The site’s content must be readable, clear and concise.
- A search facility must be available on larger sites
- Visitors must be able to make contact without having to jump through hoops.
- The site must contain supplemental visitor information such as a site map, an accessibility statement and custom error pages etc.
- Cross User Agent Compatibility
- The site must function effectively in a range of current user agents including screen readers.
- CSS hacks must be avoided in favour of conditional commenting or content negotiation.
- Ideally, the site’s content should be accessible in legacy browsers.
- Visual Design
- Designs must be original works. You may submit a site made with popular blogware like WordPress, but the theme must be an original work and extensively modified.
- The site must look great!
However there is still some work that needs to be done and we are committed to ensuring that the sdesign1 site stands out as both an example of accessibility and usability and that no one can accuse us of the 'cobbler's daughter's shoes syndrome'!
Finally our thanks go to the Accessites team for carrying out a thorough and detailed analysis and providing some very useful feedback at no charge. We recommend you take a look at their site, bookmark it and then visit it at least once a week!
