Usability and Accessibility

The growing importance of the web means that businesses must make their sites accessible to all potential visitors. Taradata will construct your web site to be compliant to W3C accessibility guidelines.

Why make your site accessible?

• The Disability and Discrimination Act 1995 may compel you to make your site accessible to all visitors
• There are a significant number of web users who are disabled in some way and your business may be excluding these potential customers
• By designing your site to be accessible by all users you will invariably find that you make the site more useable and accessible for all of your other visitors and customers.
• An accessible site will enhance your businesses image and reputation - showing that you deal with customers in business-like and professional manner.        

What is involved?

Your pages need to comply with the W3C Accessibility Guidelines. This provides a lot of technical features that your site must support. In addition you should be looking at your site from the point of view of someone with poor sight and imagine how they would navigate your site. Can they find their way around? Can they change the way your site looks so that they can read it more easily?

Useful Links

The Disability Descrimination Act 1995 Introduction - provides guidance on your responsibilities
W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines - the technical guidelines for making your web site accessible
Employers' forum on disability - excellent source of information about disability, access and building accessible web sites
e-Government Guidelines on Web Sites - very useful resources
WebAIM - more useful resources for building accessible web sites
Simplified Web Accessibility Guide by Glenda Watson Hyatt - useful guidelines
AbilityNet - useful informnation about asssistive technology