Accessibility compliance

Online compliance - it's the law

In December 1996, the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) made it unlawful to treat a disabled person less favorably than anyone else. In 2000, the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) was set up to promote and in some cases enforce this legislation.

The DRC has published a Code of Practice which particularly refers to online services and states that, 'if website operators do not consider disabled users when creating their sites, then they would be in breach of the Disability Discrimination Act'.

Immediacy leads the way with compliance checker

A major factor for organisations to consider is not simply how to achieve compliance, but how to achieve sustained online compliance.

Immediacy CMS features a built in compliance checker providing a user-friendly way for authors, editors and administrators to ensure that content complies with both accessibility and XHTML standards during editing and before publication. This gives consistent access to a wider audience, improves download and search engine performance and paves the way for achieving sustained online compliance.

The benefits of this approach include:

Only ever publishing approved compliant content
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.

The importance of in-built accessibility checking

The Immediacy CMS is one of the market leaders providing browser-based tools designed to address the growing and evolving requirements for website accessibility addressing two key issues:

1. Successful content management requires organisations to devolve publishing capabilities to non-technical users but this often increases the risk of key accessibility needs being overlooked and eroded over time. What may be a compliant site at launch can easily lose its compliance over time as new content is added and updated.

2. Current accessibility checking tools typically require site content to be on a live server and often can only check one page reference at a time. These issues, if not addressed effectively, can expose companies, even if temporarily, to breaching the Disability Discrimination Act.

Immediacy offers users the ability to run selected accessibility compliance tests while in authoring mode and before going live. These tests incorporate the acknowledged standards used by services provided by organisations such as Bobby and Watchfire and can be updated, as standards evolve, using readily available XML based open source code.

Key "compliance" developments in Immediacy can be summarised as follows:

Accessibility

Accessibility prompts built-in
Accessibility checker built-in - configurable
Tables with "colgroup" attributes for accessibility compliance
Acronyms and abbreviations are supported
An optional new font-size and accessibility colour picker plug-in

XHTML Compliance

Code clean-up on paste – even from non compliant HTML sources
XHTML validation of both content and templates
Removal of deprecated tags e.g. align=left, hspace=12 etc
Improved "remove formatting" option and "paste as text" functions
Text and image alignment applied using style classes
All font colours applied using styles - no font tags
Tables use styles which may be global or stylesheet specific

more information on achieving compliance