Accessibility Policy

We want everyone who visits our site to feel welcome and to find the experience rewarding. We have tried extremely hard to ensure that this website is accessible to everybody regardless of ability.

Here at EggCup Web Design, we know that computers are limited in their ability to test a website for accessibility compliance, and this is why we value your feedback as a guest on our site.

If you have any difficulty using our site, or would like to share your experiences, please contact us. We want to make the web a better place for everybody, so thank you for helping us do just that.

Standards compliance

  1. All pages on this site are designed to follow the accessibility guidelines as set out by the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.
  2. The guidelines have three levels of accessibility (A, AA and AAA). As a starting point, we’ve chosen Level A as the target for the EggCup Web Design website, not because we lack ambition, but because we’d rather not make claims about accessibility that we can’t fully substantiate.
  3. All pages on this site validate as HTML5 using the W3C Nu Markup Validation Service.
  4. All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for page titles and H2 tags are used for subtitles.

Structural Markup

Web pages on this website include five different areas:

  1. A header bar, which includes the primary navigation, breadcrumb links, and a search box
  2. The main content area
  3. A footer, which includes secondary navigation

When CSS is disabled (or when using a screen reader), these areas are read in the above order.

Images

  1. Unless they are purely decorative items, all images used on this web site have descriptive alt attribute content.
  2. Our site content is accessible with images turned off.
  3. The main navigation bar on this site uses only CSS for styling, and degrades gracefully for non–visual browsers.

Links

  1. Some links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target.
  2. Links are written to make sense out of context.
  3. The first link in every document is a “skip-link”. When clicked, the purpose of this link is to move the page focus directly the main content of the page.
  4. Permanent URLs are used whenever possible.

Forms

  1. Where used, all form controls are appropriately and explicitly labeled.
  2. We provide an email address and a telephone number as an alternative to our contact form.
  3. Submitted form data validation doesn’t rely upon client–side scripting.

Scripts

  1. EggCup Web Design uses non-obtrusive client-side scripting.
  2. The content of this website is accessible without JavaScript support.

Visual design

  1. This site solely uses cascading style sheets to provide visual layout.
  2. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
  3. Any information conveyed through the use of colour is also available without colour.

How To Make the Web More Accessible

The BBC provides an excellent series of guides that will help you to customise your computer to make it easier for you to use the web: My Web My Way

You might also like to try out the following accessibility software:

  1. JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time–limited, downloadable demo is available.
  2. Lynx, a free text–only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.

Accessibility References

Implementing a high standard of web accessibility is not easy. However, the basics are well-documented, and the most important thing is that web designers have an appreciation of accessibility issues. The following links provide some guidance:

  1. RNIB Web Access Centre provides a wealth of design-related advice.
  2. The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) explains the reasons behind each guideline.
  3. The W3C Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 explains how a web designer should implement each guideline.
  4. The well-respected U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines are also worth considering as part of any site build.

There are also numerous tools on the web that will evaluate a web page for you. But bear in mind that computers can only check for compliance with basic accessibility requirements.

  1. We use WAVE all the time here at EggCup. It provides a useful visual overlay of accessibility issues on your site.
  2. HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.
  3. Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.
  4. Lynx Viewer, a free service for viewing what your web pages would look like in Lynx.

Additional Resources

WebAIM, a non–profit organisation dedicated to improving accessibility to online learning materials.