People seem nervous about accessibility and we are frequently asked about the subject. There is no need to worry. There is no secret to accessibility, in fact there is a rule book and has been since 1999!

If you need to know where you stand in relation to the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) we are happy to carry out accessibility audits on websites. We can also make recommendations for compliance to ensure that your site meets at least the minimum standard required under UK law.

If you are already working on developing a website we can work with your current team to make sure that they are entirely comfortable with accessibility, especially when it comes to delivering your website.

Accessibility is not just for websites. Your message is important and needs to be presented in a relevant way in print too. We can work with your designers to make sure that your print materials are clear and easy to read.

Accessiblity on this website
Making this website as inclusive as possible is very important to us. We have adhered to the accepted World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines. As far as possible we have tried to ensure that:

All pages on this site should comply with all priority 1 and 2 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
All pages on this site validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Access keys
We don’t use access keys, read Nomensa’s article to find out why.
Links
Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target.
As far as possible, links are written to make sense out of context.

Images
All content images used in this site should include descriptive alt tags.
Purely decorative graphics include null alt tags.

Visual design
This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.
This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified “text size” option in visual browsers.
If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page should still be readable.

Accessibility references
W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.
W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer’s guide to accessibility.