Creating compliant sites
Maintaining an accessible site often involves using a compliancy
product to assess the conformance of a live site. The published
content probably fails to meet the standards as new editorial
content is added.
Commonly used compliance products include:
- Bobby
- Wave
- A-Prompt
- LiFT
- W3C Validator
These products can tell organisations when a site is out of
compliance, according to that vendor's particular interpretation of
a certain accessibility standard.
But there are two issues here, firstly that there are so many
standards, particularly if you are dealing with a global audience.
Perhaps most meaningful of all standards is the W3C Web
Accessibility Initiative, which has published its own
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Secondly, it is much easier to generate a list of non-compliant
code than generate replacement code that complies with the chosen
standards yet still delivers a usable site for the visual
browser.
Of course many of these offer add on services or consultancy to
help you correct all that non-compliant code.
Alternatively a skilled in-house expert who understands the
issues involved may be employed and unfortunately become the
bottleneck that Content Management tools were designed to
overcome.
Immediacy removes this 'external' approach to
maintaining a compliant site with the unique in-line accessibility
checker.
The benefits of this approach include:
- Only ever publishing compliant content, approved by.
- Training users as they add or edit content the checks required
to ensure conformance.
- Dramatically reducing the on-going costs of skilled experts or
software tools that deal with the 'after-event' of conformance
failure.
A survey published in May 2004 shows the requirement for such a
system:
- "Not one single FTSE 100 firm met the higher level two
accessibility guidelines, which are recommended by the UK
government as the minimum standard for businesses."
more information on accessibility solutions
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