Website Accessibility
When the Disability Discrimination Act was made law in 1999, it added a new level
of consideration to the creation and maintenance of a practice website. To
help you ensure that your website meets the needs of disabled users, the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) offers a set of guidelines. By following these guidelines web
designers can know that the pages they create are accessible to screen readers and
do not present any special difficulty to those with limited vision or mobility.
Our websites are designed following these guidelines and conform to the recommended
specifications.
The Medical Defence Union also recently released an article on this matter describing
how they have rewritten their own website to conform to these standards (InPractice
Vol3 Issue 1 May 2007).
Validation Service
If you already have a surgery website and would like us to check it for W3C compliance please let us know. We offer a service that will analyse your current website and produce a report on the processes required to achieve conformance and improve access for your disabled users. This includes:- Full website analysis
- Image and links validation
- Screen reader optimisation
- Style sheet conformance check
- Navigation advice
- Tab indexing options
- Disclaimer
- Full electronic report you can feed back to your current web developer/
This service costs £99 plus VAT.
Accessibility Tips
Images - provide a text description of the image
Font - allow users to change the size of fonts
Links - avoid "click here" and make the link more intuitive for screen readers.
Validate your website
We use Cynthia Says to validate our websites but there are others that you can use. Ensure that they are W3C compliant.
