Is your Website Compliant?
If you have not heard yet websites in Australia should now be developed with Accessibility in mind. Accessibility for a website means providing access to information for all users, including those with a disability.
The standards for this is outlined in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2 (WCAG 2.0), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Under the Disability Discrimination Act and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights all websites that are hosted in Australia or that are owned by Australian based organisations should comply with these Accessibility Standards by December 2014.
These standards include the following requirements for all websites:
- Display well on all commonly used Internet browsers.
- Work effectively with accessibility hardware and/or software.
- Accommodate a range of connection speeds including keeping pages to a minimum size.
- Be scalable to accommodate various common screen resolutions.
- Simple text resizing available via the header of the web page.
- Print style sheets should be provided to make printed pages clear and free from unnecessary material.
- Links should be friendly urls and have meaningful link text which can be read by screen readers.
- Images should have meaningful alternative 'alt' tags which can be read by screen readers.
- Navigation should be accessible to screen readers.
- In addition to this websites should also have:
- ‘Skip to Content’ links available to navigate through pages and sections on the website.
- Basic search and/or advanced search should be available.
- Colour blindness sight & cognitive impairment should be considered in design elements including colour contrasts
In November Web Prophets staff will be undertaking AGOV training so that we can meet these requirements with Industry Best Practice in Mind. AGOV is a Drupal distribution developed by Previous Next for the Australian Federal Government which has been developed specifically to meet these Accessibility requirements. In September 2014 the Australian Government announced their govCMS model which includes the AGOV distribution as the CMS of choice. We are excited to have one of the AGOV developers from Previous Next coming to Melbourne for this one day workshop for our staff.
Deaf Victoria website launches!
We are proud to announce that the Deaf Victoria website is our first AGOV AA Accessible website. On top of meeting AA compliance the website includes Ecommerce capabilities for Members and Donations utilising Paypal payments. Our donation implementation includes 'fixed' as well as 'user nominated' payment values - a big ask for a lot of NFP organisations these days.
Some of the accessible implementations include:
- A responsive theme allowing the design to scale to devices from desktop through to mobile
- Text resizing widget in the header of the website
- Hidden 'skip to content' link hidden but accessible via keyboard controls
- Structured access to all navigation via keyboard
- Simplified style sheets for printed pages
- Website links are all user friendly
- Images have ALT tags in place for screen readers
- Sitewide search