The Ethical Media website has been designed from the ground up to be as accessible to as many people as possible, without sacrificing the quality and standards of our visual design.
The first part of the process was an upgrade of our knowledge management software emKnowledge. We did this to make sure it produced standards compliant web page code, and that stylesheets where used to control almost all of the look and feel of the site. As normal, we have produced a low graphics version of the site.
The benefits to you, the user, are that our site should work on all modern browsers that support standards based XHTML and CSS. This includes IE 5 , Opera 7 , Mozilla 1.5 , Mac Safari 1.1 browsers amongst others. You can use the settings within these browsers to override any of the style settings on the Ethical Media website, including font sizing, colours or even specifying your own custom stylesheet.
Note: Following discussions with peers, we decided to remove the tabindex and accesskey features on our site as we are concerned that their use may impede users as much as help them, despite the UK government's recommendations on the issue. A full story will be posted up on this in due course, thanks to John Foliot from WATS.ca in particular.
We have retained a 'Skip Navigation' Link at the entry point to each page, which will take the user to the top of the main content of the page.
In terms of compliance with existing accessibility standards we are proud to say from our own testing that the site meets the highest Triple A accessibility standards as laid down by the WCAG. We used the automated Bobby tool to complete tests on each page before site launch.
Our technical director has extensive experience of web accessibility issues gained from working at the RNIB and this also allows us to offer an extensive set of accessibility services. Key clients include Ofcom, the UK's communications industry regulator, and the RNIB themselves, conducting research on accessible video production and usage on the web.
To ensure ongoing compliance and accessibility we are producing key guidelines for staff who are authorised to publish content on the site. Nothing too onerous, just best practice ways of adding headers, styling content, adding images etc. which will ensure our site continues to be an exemplar of best practice.
If you have any questions or feedback on the accessibility of our site, we would love to hear from you, please get in touch.