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Audits and Testing

Levels of Accessibility

With the changes brought into place in Part III of the DDA in October 1999 every web site needs to be designed with the site's accessibility taken into consideration. At The Images Group we now build accessible web site's as standard incorporating as many features as possible.

We will advice our clients on how best to make thier web pages accessible, however depending upon the client's preference, the level of accessibility they want may vary. Depending upon the project, you may simply wish to bring your web site up to date to comply with the DDA, or go for a fully accessible solution.

Accessibility Standards

Our staff have been trained to build accessible web sites using the international web standards for WCAG 1.0 and Section 508. We would recommend choosing one of these so that your web site can be tested against a recognised web standard.

Web Content Accessibility Group 1.0 (WCAG 1.0)

The WCAG 1.0 standards were created by the Web Accessibility Inituative (WAI) in May 1999. The WCAG 1.0 provides three different levels of accessibility. You can choose the level of accessibility which is right for you depending upon the complexity of your web site and size of the project.

A collection of guidelines, technical specifications are available for reference from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) web site. In order to meet the WCAG 1.0 standards your web pages must pass all checkpoints for that particular level of compliance. These checkpoints are broken down into 3 priority levels which will decide which level of accessibility you meet. To meet a higher level of compliance you must meet all of the checkpoints for the previous level of compliance.
  • WCAG 1.0 Single A.
    All Priority 1 checkpoints are satisfied.
    This is not to be seen as a basic level of web accessibility. Meeting the Single A standard means you have removed potential aspects of your web site which would make one or more groups find it impossible to access information in your documents.
  • WCAG 1.0 Double A.
    All Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints are satisfied.
    Double A compliance is a more intermediate level than Single A with more strict checkpoints. By meeting Double A you will make your web site less difficult to access to by certain user groups.
  • WCAG 1.0 Triple A.
    All Priority 1, 2, and 3 checkpoints are satisfied.
    If you really want to go that extra mile with your web site's level of accessibility than Triple A compliance is for you. Triple A complaiance is more advanced than the previous two and meeting this means you will be improving access to your information.

Other standards

  • Section 508.
    Section 508 is a requirement for all US federal agencies.
    Section 508 covers similar aspects of web accessibility found in the WCAG 1.0 standards. It can be thought of as being an intermediate standard covering checkpoints found in Single A and some from Double A.

Accessibility Audits

When we build your web site we aim from the start to meet Single A complance. Along the way and at the end of your web site's creation we will use a combination of automated tools and manual assessments to check for potential "barriers" in a web page.

There is as yet no tool that can perform a completely automatic assessment on the checkpoints in the guidelines, and fully automatic testing may remain difficult or impossible.
Since you can't replace a human being we always analyse your web pages in detail ourselves.

The end result is a web site which satisfies both your needs and meets web standards

 

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Email: info@theimagesgroup.co.uk

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