Access your audience with accessible web sites
red badge is committed to producing sites that ensure your message gets across to all your visitors; that comply with disability legislation; and that conform to accessibility guidelines and web standards.
For a charity or a small business, the Internet offers a low-cost and effective means of communicating with existing supporters or customers and engaging with new ones. Yet a recent report showed that more than 80% of web sites are inaccessible to many users. Others are so slow-loading that visitors give up; or fail to deliver the information users are seeking. The chance to pass on your message should not be wasted by poor or inappropriate design.
What does accessibility mean? Will it cost extra?
An accessible web site is one where the content is accessible to every visitor - it's as simple as that. But it's surprising how many sites fail to meet this simple and obvious aim. In the end, it's the content of your site the visitors are after - and by designing to web standards accessibility comes built-in and no extra cost.
You know in advance only one thing about your visitors: they have access to the internet. Other than that, you don't know anything about them: what browser, what type of machine, what type of display, what size or resolution of monitor, whether indeed they are seeing or hearing your web site, and so on.
It doesn't cost extra to do the job right in the first place. But fixing a site which has had inaccessibility designed in can often be a bigger and more complex job than the original one by the designers who got it wrong. Once a site has been fixed, though, future costs of maintenance, upgrade and redesign are substantially reduced.
What accessibility doesn't mean
It doesn't mean that the site looks the same in every browser - that is a technically impossible aim. How could a site 'look' the same to a blind visitor who is hearing your site? Nor does it mean that the design has to be dull and boring.
If you want to find out more about potential accessibility problems, and how they could be affecting your web site, try this tutorial.
Why standards matter
All browsers are not the same! Opera, Internet Explorer and Firefox have different display defaults, as do Internet Explorer and Safari on Mac computers, and Konqueror on PCs running Linux. Sites designed to accommodate the foibles and bugs of one particular browser may be unusable in another browser, and may fail in unpredicatable ways. By conforming to the published standards, you will ensure that your site works with any browser. You can check if a site follows the standards by using the World Wide Web Consortium's validator.
Disability discrimination legislation and common sense mean that your site should be accessible with any browser, not just the latest version of Internet Explorer. If it isn't, then you are losing potential customers, turning away potential supporters, and running the risk of legal action. A red badge web site won't compromise on three things: Accessibility, Compatibility and Reliability.
"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."
-- Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web
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