Accessibility

We develop websites to reach the widest possible audience, which means making them as accessible and usable as possible.

Making a website ‘accessible’ may sound like it requires additional work, however this is rarely the case when accessibility is taken into account from the start.

Generally speaking, a well developed website that follows web standards, has a logical structure and is developed with common sense is likely to be highly accessible already — which also means it is highly usable too.

To ensure our websites meet accessibility standards, we follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), who are the main international standards organisation for the World Wide Web.

The WCAG define three levels of conformance:

• A — the lowest level covering the most basic web accessibility features;
• AA — tackles the biggest and most common barriers to accessibility; and
• AAA — the highest level, applying the strictest rules for conformance.

Each level builds on the previous one: to be level AA compliant you must meet every level A guideline as well as every level AA guideline.

While many criteria for level AAA conformance are straightforward to achieve, other criteria may be difficult to meet due to limited resources for content production. For example: Success Criterion 2.4.10 Section Headings simply requires section headings to be used to organise content while Success Criterion 1.2.6 Sign Language (Prerecorded) requires sign language interpretation to be provided for all media containing pre-recorded audio.

Level AA is therefore generally seen as the minimum level to meet, which is the level adopted by many governments, including here in the UK, the United States, Australia and in the EU Parliament.

Our website meets full level AA conformance, and also meets 18 of the 28 level AAA guidelines: as well as improving accessibility these additional items also improve readability and usability for all users.

If you have any issues using our website, our would like to share any accessibility concerns you have, then please contact us — we always value feedback and suggestions.