Accessibility Issues

Web site accessibility and flexibility is important for many groups. Those who are disabled may use a braille or speech browser. Others may download your site to their phones or PDAs on very small screens. Many more are using old browsers, old hardware or slow modem connections.

If you don't wish to lose visitors, you have to make sure all the pages in your site are viewable by the widest possible audience. Adding 'Please upgrade your browser to Internet Explorer 6' is simply not an option. At best it's insulting, at worst, illegal (the RNIB's site has information on accessible web design and the implications of the Disability Discrimination Act for web sites).

With a SiteWriter site, since all pages are based on a single template document, ensuring compliance for that one document will get you 99% of the way to a AAA compliant web site.

Background

The World Wide Web Consortium has published a set of standards for web site accessibility. There are a number of checkpoints which fall into three levels of priority. Priority levels from the W3C web site:

Priority 1 (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 (AA)

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 (AAA)

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.

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