Accessibility Services

Love Web Design's Accessibility Services

What is Accessibility?

Accessibility is a general term used to describe the level to which a product, item, service or an environment is accessible by as many people as possible. Accessibility can be viewed as the "ability to access" the functionality, and the possible benefit of some system or entity. (definition gathered from wikipedia, cambridge dictionary

Web accessibility is defined as allowing both disabled people, non-disabled people, those with age or injury related issues and those with alternative methods (Assistive Technologies, Mobile Phones & PDAs) to access your online facility no matter what technology they are using.

In short web accessibility is now about adapting your existing web site or developing new web sites to include access for everyone and with approximately 10million people in the UK with a disability of some form and a combined disposable income of approximately £50 billion a year you would be mad to turn this business away.

Why is Web Accessibility an Issue?

There are many reasons why Web Accessibility is important, here are a few:

Use of the web is spreading - not everyone is web aware; a user friendly web site will encourage visitors to stay, browse and revisit
There are many barriers for all kinds of disabilities when accessing the web; the more accessible your web site is the wide audience you are open to
There is more demand for web sites to load on alternative devices such as Mobile Phones and PDAs which have limited support for large images and active content like Flash and Javascript; by adapting your website to these technologies you will increase your audience
There are still users that have 56k modems where web sites are inaccessible purely because of the download time; creating websites for this type of audience can be combined with the standard high end design, it just needs a little more planning from the designer
Web sites are now required by law to be accessible; this could result in a fine at some point in the future although no cases have been brought to court in the UK as yet (correct at time of publishing)
Web accessibility also has other benefits;

Why Should I Change my Web Site?

In the UK the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 or DDA as it is called for short, requires that any business or individual that provides goods or services should make "reasonable efforts" to ensure that all services are accessible to everyone. The Act was extended in 2005 and specifically included web sites as services.

What is an Accessible Web Site?

An accessible web site, in the broadest sense, is a web site that can be accessed and understood by everyone, regardless of the software, hardware or technology they may be using.

Creating a new website, or making your current web site accessible will benefit everybody including you as:

Your web site will load faster;
Your web site will be accessible to a larger audience;
Your users will be more able to customise your web site appearance;
Your web site will provide print-friendly pages;
Be easier to maintain, less code takes up less space;
Semantically designed code is not only user friendly but also search engine friendly;
Design and content can be re-styled easily, without changing the code throughout the site;

How Can Love Web Design help?

We can assess your web site to ensure meets and/or exceeds the required standards of accessibility, provide you with realistic recommendations and a full report for any issues that your web site may have.

We can undertake the work in a timely fashion without taking your web site offline or impacting your web business, creating a solution that is both cost-effective and meets all standards and requirements necessary.