Accessibility

We live in an age where technology is making it increasingly possible for people from all places and of all abilities to have access to a great variety of information. The idea of Web Accessibility is, according to the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium, the governing body for web standards), "that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web."

In addition to this we live in an age where promoting equal opportunity is vital. Therefore having a website displaying inaccessible content, which is not accessible to a visitor in any other format, leaves you liable to accusations of discrimination.

Simple Site uses XStandard, a visual content editor, which checks the content you enter to ensure that it can be accessed by people of all abilities. It also offers a unique screen reader preview which allows you to view your content, without formatting, as it would be read by a screen reader to a visually impaired visitor. This enables you to ensure that all information is emphasised in a manner which is clear to someone who cannot see the formatting of the page.

In addition to XStandard you should abide by the following guidelines to ensure your website is accessible:

  1. Ensure your template is fully accessible. As Simple Site only manages the content within your template, it cannot guarentee the accessibility of your template.
  2. Do not modify the HTML behind your content. Edit your content in the XStandard editor.
  3. Validate your pages. Simple Site provides a link to validate each of your pages, against W3C guidelines, when you modify them.

As there are many factors outside of what Simple Site manages (your template, editing of the HTML behind your content, failing to fill in all content accessibility requirements (image alternate tags, table summaries)), it cannot be guarenteed that your website will be fully accessible merely by using Simple Site. You should check each page against a tool such as Watchfire WebXACT to determine their actual accessiblity.