Accessibility / Usability
Next Big Leap can design and develop websites based on the W3C guidelines.
Under the Disability Discrimination Act your duty to avoid discrimination includes your website. You must take reasonable steps to make sure that your website does not discriminate against disabled visitors.
Making your website more accessible sends out a good message about your business. It also means that more visitors can benefit from the facilities and services on your website.
For certain websites, addressing accessibility can be a legal requirement. This is usually the case for government sites, but can also affect others.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or WCAG became a W3C recommendation on the 5th of May 1999 (becoming a W3C recommendation is an extremely tough and long process). This is achieved through 14 gudelines with a total of 60 checkpoints. There are varying levels of effort people are willing to put in to making their sites accessible, to take this into account, checkpoints are broken down into 3 different priority levels - priority 1, priority 2 and priority 3. For pages that are produced to conform to any of the above priority levels there are a matching set of conformance levels:
- Level ‘A’ - All Priority 1 checkpoints are satisfied.
- Level ‘Double-A’ - All Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints are satisfied.
- Level ‘Triple-A’ - All Priority 1, 2, and 3 checkpoints are satisfied.
Usability
Usability means ensuring visitors to your website can find what they are looking for in a reasonably quick and efficient manner. The second a user asks a question such as, how do I find….? How can I get to….? Or has to make a guess to find a product, service or information, usability has failed.
Next Big Leap know how important this is, we can improve usability for screen reader users, as well as other visitors by ensuring basic guidelines are followed, such as:
- using descriptive headings
- providing information in lists
- writing short, front loaded paragraphs
- designing effective navigation
