Accessibility

The Disability Discrimination Act makes it illegal for a service provider to discriminate against disabled people. If your website is used for business purposes then, under the terms of the DDA, you are a service provider.

It's not just a case of adding ALT tags to images but considering accessibility issues from the start. DDA-aware websites tend to look better on mobile devices and are crawled better by search engines (which are in effect text browsers with Javascript turned off)

Consider the following:

• The site should be usable in a text browser. This is a basic browser with no support or CSS, graphics or Javascript.
• xHTML tags are used to define table captions and column headings. This helps browsers to make more sense of the page structure.
  
• Font sizes are not hard-coded, but stored as percentage sizes. This allows users to resize the fonts directly in the browser.
  
• Navigation links (such as the toolbars and left-hand links) are rendered as an xHTML list with only CSS used for formatting. This makes them usable on basic browsers. There is always a link to bypass the navigation and jump straight to content.
  
• Images have ALT and TITLE tags where appropriate. The ALT tag is shown on text browsers which don't handle images. The TITLE tag is used on graphical browsers as a tool-tip.
  

Our websites are explicitly tested to work on text browsers, normal browsers with Javascript turned off and Opera in small screen mode for PDAs.