Last week we had the opportunity to meet with Web Accessibility
expert Gian
Wild. Accessibility and usability is something we take very
seriously when designing and developing websites and it was great
to meet Gian to learn more about how we can work with her and offer
our clients an even better quality outcome for their sites. We're
excited about having the opportunity to work with Gian in the near
future and would like to provide more information about
accessibility through this blog.
There are so many different facets to web accessibility and we
believe it should be an important part of building a website. As
part of the Zeroseven quality assurance process we check our
designs and code at every stage, using tests that are based on the
W3C WCAG guidelines (http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/); the
W3C being somewhat the industry authority when it comes to web
standards.
In saying this, testing web accessibility can be a vague
process. We believe engaging with experts such as Gian provides a
greater understanding of what should be achieved when it comes to
offering a better experience to disabled users who, statistics
show, can make up to 20% of the people using a website.
More Information
When it comes to website accessibility in Australia, the
Victorian Government is leading the way with guidelines and
legislation. I have found many useful and practical articles on
their website, including this helpful overview: http://www.divine.vic.gov.au/main-site/tech-talk/computing-the-web/making-web-pages-accessible
Gian Wild has written an article about testability as a
requirement in WCAG 2.0 on A List Apart http://www.alistapart.com/articles/testability/.
She blogs reguarly on website accessibility and more at www.gianwild.com.