W3C Web Standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a diverse collection of important figures within the internet world – technology developers, content providers, corporate users, research laboratories, standards bodies, and governments, all of whom endeavour to apply a set of guidelines to the way that websites are designed and maintained in order to ensure that web site content is available to the largest possible number of users, regardless of how they view they browse the web, what tools they use and whether they have any disability.

As a means to exact these guidelines upon web developers the W3C has developed a site validation service, which tests websites files for conformance to the W3C recommendations. This validation service is offered for XHTML (The file type we use to bring a site’s content to your internet browser) and CSS (The file which integrates our design into the ‘code’ behind your website), all of our websites will comply with this validation and as such be some way towards providing a fully accessible web design.

Website Accessibility

Why does our site need to be accessible? An accessible website has a huge number of advantages – Blind users may utilise a screen reader which uses speech synthesis to read out a web site’s content, valid and semantic XHTML design means that this will work the way that the software intends. Partially sighted visitors will need to increase the size of the text on your website and valid CSS design will be needed to allow this to happen. Deaf visitors and those with no mouse access along with web users with Colour Blindness and even Epilepsy are also considered.

Accessibility on This Site

The site uses semantically correct mark-up (the correct tag for the correct purpose), text size can be increased via your browser and wherever Flash and Javascript are used, measures have been put in place to ensure that viewers without Flash 7 or with Javascript disabled will still be able to use the site to it’s full potential.