Your website needs to cater for people with disabilities of various kinds, such as sight impairment of varying degrees, colour blindness, hearing impairment and other physical disabilities.
Many organisations have disability and equity policies, and as a very public face of the business, the website must embrace those policies.
What to do
There are some steps you should take during the building of the website to comply with government legislation and as a gesture of goodwill towards all users.
- Build a text-only version of the site. This version of the site will contain no images, animations, roll-overs etc. It will contain text only. This makes for a very fast site and if the font size of the text is enlarged will cater for many sight-impaired users. This version of the site would need to be accessible via a button on the home page.
- Review the accessibility guidelines as published by the internationally recognised peak body in setting Web standards - the World Wide Web Consortium: http://www.w3.org.
- Test your site for its level of accessibility using the Bobby website. This will give your site an accessibility rating that is recognised by the Webcommunity. It can be accessed at http://www.cast.org/bobby/.
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