Disability Accessibility Services - Making Web sites Usable By All

Epsilis is committed to making the web more usable for all. This includes making the web accessible to people with disabilities, including visual impairment, hearing difficulties and restricted movement.

We believe in web pages designed for universal access. This means all browsers, all devices.

At Epsilis we follow the latest accessibility standards and guidelines provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) under their Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). They provide a list of checkpoints that a website should satisfy.

Our Disability Accessibility Services

Epsilis provides a range of services to help companies achieve compliance with legislation and bring their website up to the appropriate accessibility standards. We have a variety of accessibility audit services as well as the ability to recode your website to meet accessibility standards or to redesign your website incorporating accessibility standards.

These review and audit services are only available to web site owners and not to third parties.

Quick Accessibility Review = £200 (+vat)

We can do a brief one page evaluation report pointing out some of the main areas of concern.

For this service we require the website site url and basic contact information for the site owner. The review will be limited to a maximum of 5 web pages sampled from the web site and will only focus on the most obvious accessibility issues. We will normally email a report in pdf format to the web site owner within 7 working days of receiving the request.

We can only review web site pages that we can readily access as any other casual site visitor. We will also need to see the source code of the pages which you can normally do via the web site browser unless it has been deliberately hidden from view.

We reserve the right to not provide a report at our discretion. If we choose not to you will be informed by email that this is the case.

Preliminary Accessibility Conformance Review

A preliminary review will help to quickly identify the scope of accessibility problems on a Web site and is based on the guidelines for such reviews as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibiliy Initiative (WAI). It is not however a full Accessibility Conformance Review to W3C WAI standards (see next service)

This is a review of a representative sampling of pages from the website. We run a series of manual standard tests using a browser with various settings adjusted and run some automated tests. We will provide a report indicating the types of problems encountered and recommended follow-up actions.

Full Accessibility Conformance Evaluation and Audit

This is a full review of accessibility problems on a Web site and is based on the guidelines for such reviews as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

This service is available for web sites under development or for fully operational web sites. It will determine the priority level met and the problem areas associated with meeting the various priority levels. An exhaustive series of manual and automated tests are run against all the checkpoints stated by WAI.

A detailed and informative report is provided which: details the types of problems encountered; and recommends follow-up actions covering remedial action required and planning for ongoing maintenance and monitoring of the web site. This report can be used to help define your company website accessibility strategy. You can find full details on our site designed to promote web accessibility.

Making your website accessible:

We can recode your existing website to be accessible. In many cases this may be possible without changing the design of your website.

We can redesign your website to update it to meet your current business needs and at the same time incorporating accessibility standards.

We can help you define procedures and train you to keep your website accessible as content is updated and maintained and the website develops in the future

Please contact us to discuss your specific needs.

Regards

Michael Spencer, Managing Director.
michael@epsilis.co.uk
Epsilis - Website Designers
47 Farthing Drive
Letchworth Garden City
Hertfordshire (Herts)
SG6 2TR
UK

A Legal Perspective

Here is an article kindly provided by Richard Swinburn of Swinburn Chandler-Smith, Solicitors outlining a web accessibility from their perspective as legal advisors.

Why make your web site accessible to all:

Moral obligation:

Why discriminate against those with disabilities or special needs. The web offers great opportunities to learn, interact, communicate, be entertained and generally improve our life style. This applies more so to some disabled groups so why put barriers in their way.

It makes good business sense:

Why turn away customers? There are 8.5 million people with disabilities in the UK with an estimated annual spending power of £40 billion (Source: Disability Rights Commission). Making your web site accessible ensures that your online information and services can be accessed and used by these people.

It is a legal requirement:

The UK Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 states that it is unlawful for “a provider of services” to discriminate against a disabled person in failing to comply with its provisions.

The wording of the Act did not mention on-line services specifically. In February 2002 The Disability Rights Commission published a Code of Practice which removed any ambiguity by defining that the Act does apply to on-line services such as websites.

Therefore if your business or organisation has a website, it should be accessible to the disabled and you could be sued for discrimination in the UK if your website does not meet certain standards.

Bonuses:

Accessible websites tend to work well in search engines and can work on other devices such as mobile phones and PDA’s with little or no extra effort.

It you would like to share this:
Web Design and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) covering Hertfordshire (Herts) and Bedfordshire (Beds)