Disability Discrimination Act

November 3rd, 2006

The DDA is the UK governments legislation that governs all sorts of businesses and services to ensure that people with disabilities can access the same services as everyone else.

(un)Fortunately for web designers this legislation covers web services too! At Trinity we’ve developed certain working practices that ensure all our client sites are DDA compliant as possible. So what are these requirements, and what can be done to ensure that your next project isn’t going to get your clients sued?

We’ll it’s not actually that difficult, thanks to our friends at the W3C who’ve drawn up a Checklist of Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. In general It’s acceptable to ensure all your pages meet at least the Priority 1 checkpoints (or provide an alternative page that does) and as far as possible follow the Priority 2 checkpoints - especially so if your site is intended for the wider EU user-base.

So, getting back to basics, what do you really need to do to ensure your website is compliant? (remember, these are the bare minimum, always refer back to the W3C guidelines).

• Use (x)HTML and CSS to separate content and design. That way users can turn-off the styling and control the size and colour of the text as they wish
• Use alt tags on images to describe their content and title tags on links and abbr items to give an extended explanation of what these elements are.
• The use of accesskeys to offer an alternative way of navigation on all main navigation, and any sub-navigation possible
• Use Javascript to replace any Flash elements, so you’re providing an html alternative

These four things will not only cover many of the guidelines, but also increase you’re chances of getting listed in the search engines too. It’s worth investing a little more time investigation exactly what the DDA requires of web sites, an good staring place may be to Google “DDA” and read up on some of the official (and not so official) documents you find. Don’t underestimate the good that following the guidelines will do your website, it’s well worth investing the time to find out more.

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Super Soup

October 27th, 2006

I dunno why I found this so funny, well, interesting I guess.. Paul in the office brought a Loyd Grossman soup that supposedly you can fit in the microwave. When he discovered that it actaully wouldn’t fit in our stinky office micro he decided to exercise his consumer rights by writing a review of the soup on a certain review site…

Paul said:

Hey Loyd! Next time you design the packaging for a soup suitable for microwave heating why not make sure it stands up in the microwave?

Which I thought was a pretty resonable thing to say, the people at the review site however had other ideas…

Dear poppa999,

Thank you for submitting your review of Lloyd Grossman Maris Piper Potato & Leek soup to Review Centre (www.reviewcentre.com). Unfortunately it has not been approved for one or more of the following reasons.

1. Your review was too short and hence may not have contained enough valuable information.
2. Your review may have been on a religious or political topic or contained sexual content.
3. We feel that you may be reviewing your own or a competitor’s product for the good of your own business.
4. Your review criticised other people or a business in such a way that to publish it might make Review Centre liable to legal action.

Please do not let this discourage you from re-writing your review or writing further reviews on the website.

Kind Regards,
The webmaster

So it seems that even when you have a valid point, you can’t get it aired. Hmm.. maybe I’m just running out of ideas of what to write. More soon.

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