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How We Built This Site

Web accessibility is about removing the barriers within a website's design to enable all potential customers to access your website. As diversity training specialists, Equality Matters Ltd is highly aware of the importance of web accessibility.

Ensuring that your website is accessible can require time, effort and resources. However the benefits do not just relate to social responsibility. There are many other good reasons to make the change:

• Increase the audience you can reach not only by people with disabilities but also those with older browsers and those with new technology like mobile phone devices.
• Better usability for everyone.
• Improved server performance as accessibility usually reduces the storage space a website requires.
• Reduction of web maintenance costs as the code is more organised and easier to understand.
• Forward compatibility with future technologies.

How To Build An Accessible Site

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3G) have laid down accessibility guidelines to which a website should comply. So how do you know if your site meets these criteria? This can be done via a series of both automated and manual tests carried out by a web designer who understands the guidelines and how they should be implemented. Some of the key elements of web accessibility are:

• Separate style from content.
  Where possible CSS should be used for layout and style. If CSS is switched off by the end-user, they should still be able to navigate and understand the site.
• Semantic Structure and Page Organisation.
  Pages should be organised in a logical and consistent manner. A breadcrumb trail (e.g. Home > About) can help an end-user to understand where they are within the site. The HTML code should be semantically correct e.g. headings should be marked up with heading tags and lists should be marked up with list tags.
• Imagery.
  All content images should include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics should include null ALT attributes. Complex images should include LONGDESC attributes or inline descriptions to explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers.
• Multimedia.
  All multimedia features such as audio or video should have captions or text transcripts available.
• Hypertext links.
  Avoid the use of 'click here' links. All links should use text that makes sense when read out of context. Some assistive devices will summarize the links available on a page and display these to the end-user.
• Scripts, applets, & plug-ins.
  Access to content should not depend on the availability or support of scripts, applets or plug-ins.
• Browser Compatibility.
  Unfortunately all browsers (and versions of browsers) do not render website code in the same way. Compatibility testing is important for any site to ensure that it is usable in all of the major browsers. The following statistics are taken from http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php and indicate the global browser market share for March 2009:
  1. Internet Explorer 7.0 = 31.60%
  2. Internet Explorer 6.0 = 25.44%
  3. Firefox 3.0 = 17.13%
  4. Firefox 2.0 = 12.29%
  5. Firefox 1.5 = 1.65%
  6. Safari 3.1 = 1.06%
  7. Safari 3.0 = 0.70%
  8. Mozilla 1.9 = 0.62%
  9. Opera 9.2 = 0.59%
  10. Internet Explorer 8.0 = 0.59%

These are just some of the important factors to be considered when building an accessible website. Both www.equality-matters.co.uk and the InterACT Learning Management System were built with these principles at its heart. More information on the specific elements of accessibility of this site can be found in the Accessibility Statement.

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