Accessibility

Accessibility is the term used to describe how easy it is for users with disabilities to access your online materials. Disabilities are wide ranging from minor visual impairment to complete blindness; physical disability to cognitive disability.

Although the term "disability" is used accessibility is also about making sure all visitors are able to use your site easily, for example older visitors with effects of aging or someone who's forgotten their glasses.

hum has years of experience handling accessibility issues and making sites work well with assistive technology.

Unlike many design houses, our developers and designers work together to ensure that site designs are not only visually pleasing and stimulating, but also technically feasible, and easy to view across the range of platforms and browsers available on the web today.

Accessibility lies at the heart of all our web development projects. To ensure the site complies with the new legislation we will make sure that all of the content is available as text (where appropriate), to make sure that users able to use screen readers. Users will also be able to use their browser or other software to customise the appearance of the site with their own styles, for example, to use high contrast colours.

Accessibility on the web requires in depth knowledge and experience of the issues faced by your disabled users. Important factors include the way users access content and the assistive technologies they use such as screen readers, magnifiers and colour schemes.

An important factor when addressing accessibility issues is applying that effort to other problem areas such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Legislation

As of October 2004, both private and public companies should be aware of part 3 of the Disability Discrimination Act (http://www.disability.gov.uk/dda/). This act requires websites to meet a required standard to allow effective access to the information contained within a website to the 8.6 million disabled British people. The Disability Rights Commission (DRC), established in April 2000 to protect the rights of disabled persons by Parliament, will be able to take action for disabled individuals who feel they are discriminated against. This means, for example, that the images and text in a disabled discrimination compliant website should be supported by the spoken word.