Accessibility

As of late a lot of people talk of accessibility, and more often than not, they do not really see the whole picture. Usually people assume that accessibility means making a web page accessible to the people with disabilities. While actual problem lies much deeper. Accessibility means making information accessible to potentially any device that can access it. It also means that presentation of the information is in no way related to actual information.

Why

Why do we at Engage Group insist on this? Why do we make information accessible to machines?

Well, someone is usually operating these machines. Someone is going to access this information and consume it. The trick is that we do not really know what they are going to be using to access it. To name but a few potential devices: PC, Printer, mobile phone, PDA, screen reader, brail terminal etc.

Also equally important the information may be consumed by other "machines" by other programs like search engine spiders, data indexers, converters or even other web pages.

How

How do we at Engage Group achieve this?

Most importantly, we start every project with accessibility in mind. We do not modify the final product to comply; we conceive it to be accessible.

• We code to standards. All of our code is validated by W3C validators.
• We design content separately from presentation. We design all pages to be well formatted, and completely usable and accessible with no styles applied.
• We validate accessibility, using validators (Bobby, WAI), but we do not "tweak" the code to pass.