Web Accessibility for All!
'Web Standards’, ‘Best Practice for Web’, ‘W3C’, CSS’, ‘XHTML’…
…If your not quite sure what any of these things mean or where to start looking to find out more then read on!
Once upon a time in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing. Nobody could have anticipated just how popular this would become or how it is now taken for granted as part of everyday life at home and in business. However, we have come a long way since then, and ensuring that information on the web is accessible to everyone, is something we should all take seriously, as there is a question of equality at stake.
To address this, Tim Berners-Lee founded and is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C for as it is better known. The W3C “develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential”.
In short, W3C have developed a way of checking that a website has been built to a good standard, to ensure that care has been taken to ensure the information contained in the website, is accessible to all web users. A ‘valid’ website is one where the individual pages within the site validate and to test for this, the W3C ‘Markup Validator’ has been provided free of charge. Whilst this is not full-proof, i.e. it assesses that it is a good page and has found the page to comply with a specific set of rules, but not that it is necessarily a ‘good web page’. However, it does go to show that care and effort have gone into ensuring a website is accessible.
Websites built to this standard (or more specifically the individual pages within it) are permitted to display the W3C ‘valid’ icons providing they pass the validation tests, though these should never be considered as a "W3C ‘seal of quality’ – for more information, go to: http://validator.w3.org/docs/help.html#icon
The government also take this very seriously. The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) was passed in 1995 to address the discrimination that many disabled people face. Section III of the DDA, which relates to accessible websites, came into force in the UK on 1st October 1999 and the Code of Practice for this section of the DDA was published on 27th May 2002. Basically what this means is; websites that do not meet minimum W3C web standards, are in breach of the law and in theory if a company has not taken appropriate steps to ensure it’s website can be used by disabled people, then basically, they can be sued.
At Focus Advertising and Communications, from an ethical stance we are committed to educating our clients and ensuring all of our web content follows W3C guidelines very carefully. By ensuring that all the websites we build are based on CSS / XHTML and all of our web content is as accessible as possible, this not only ensures that steps are taken towards a more accessible internet for disabled users, but best practice web builds is also very helpful in assisting with ‘search engine optimisation’ (SEO).
Google and all the major search engines, look much more favourably upon sites built to current best practice for web. So in theory, providing that your website contains useful, well structured content and it is presented in an accessible, easy to navigate structured site built to W3C web standards, then you should find that over time, you will achieve the sort of results you are hoping for. The reason for this is quite simply: when a site is indexed ('spidered’ by search engine ‘search-bots’ that are used to scour the web, constantly updating the information held by the search engines database of near all information online) your site being having been built to this standard, ensures that it can be read extremely easily and therefore, you have a much more likely chance of being top of the list in a search, providing that the information on your website is relevant.
We hope that this article and the links provided have been useful to you. If you would like to speak to us in more detail to find out how ‘ethical’, best practice web standards can help benefit your business or organisation, then please call us today and ask to speak with Francis Vassallo. Alternatively, feel free to send us an email or contact us using the contact form on our site;
http://www.focusadvertising.co.uk/page/contact/
We are constantly looking at new ways to ensure that everything that we do is accessible to all.