Accessible Web Design
There are two ways to build a website. One is to build it for non-disabled people, and then spend the rest of the time scratching your head, wondering how you can tack on some solution so disabled people can get a useful experience of the site too. Or you could build the site with accessibility in mind from the start. You get one guess at how we work. Answers on a postcard, please.
Accessible web design benefits everybody
There's a legal obligation to make sites accessible under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). There's a commercial incentive, too: there are over 10 million people with various disabilities in the UK, with an estimated annual spending power of £80 billion - do you really want to alienate such a huge market?
Building accessible sites has other benefits, too: smaller file sizes gives faster load-time and reduced hosting costs. Search engines can more easily read accessible sites and this helps to give you higher search rankings.
We're good. Really good.
At Raspberry Frog, we are fiercely passionate about building pages which are fully compliant and accessible.
We're a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS) and part of the GAWDS administration team, an Accessites award winner, and we understand the public sector's duty to promote online social responsibility and disability equality. Each website we build complies with the DDA regulations for web accessibility.
Thinking accessibility
We test our sites with real people (accessibility testing) as well as carrying out manual testing using our own accessibility testing protocol - a much more effective way of testing than using some of the automated tools used by other agencies.
Everyone in our team understands accessibility, and implements it into the core of what we do. We even have our own Head of Accessibility, who keeps us all on the straight and narrow.
