Accessibility Auditing

Tagish takes an holistic approach to our accessibility auditing in order to ensure that your site can be used by the widest possible number of people.

Whilst the drivers for accessibility are often legal and standards related,.we use a mix of automated tools and manual checks, we will examine your website's overall accessibility to check whether any of your website users are likely to encounter any problems.We produce a detailed report, identifying areas where changes need to be made in order to improve the overall accessibility of your website. Auditing carried out by Tagish can include any of the following, but we would always advise considering as many areas as possible in order to maximise the accessibility of your site.

Standards Compliance

We check for compliance with whichever key national and international standards you wish, incuding:

W3C WAI Level One (A)
W3C WAI Level Two (AA)
W3C WAI Level Three (AAA)
UK Government Guidelines
Section 508 (US government requirements)

We will identify any areas where your site is not compliant with a standard, and also provide a summary of all actions required, enabling you to arrange for the necessary changes to be made. We can also retest against those points once they have been addressed, to confirm that standard compliance has been achieved.

Code Validation:

It is essential to use well-written code that conforms to international standards. (All website code should valdiate against the appropriate specification). This supports the development of accessible web content, ensuring that it looks right in as many browsers as possible, and also helps to support assistive technologies, such as JAWS, which help users with disabilities.

We test that all code is valid and supports accessibility, including HTML, XHTML, CSS and can also test RSS/ATOM feeds, XML Schemas if needed.

PDF Accessibility:

A lot of documents are provided as PDF files - but generating fully accessible PDFs can be a challenge. Tagish can test these files to ensure that the PDFs on your site are accessible, and provide specific remedial advice if issues do occur.

Colour Contrast

It is important to ensure that there is sufficient contrast between background and foreground colours on your website to allow the content to be read easily. If this is not the case, some people who visit your website will not be able to access the content. Tagish will test the colours used on your website using a series of algorithms to ensure that the contrast is as accessible as possible, and that the colours used do not provide problems for visually impaired users of your site.

Readability

The key with readability is to be clear who your audience are, and at what level you expect the content of your site to be comprehended. For example, a website offering I.T. Services would be likely to use much more complicated language than a website offering public services to the community at large. The best way to ensure that your content is as clear as possible is to ensure that plain English is used, and that jargon is avoided whenever possible. We test your site content using reading level algorithms to providea strong indication of how readable your site's content is, and whether your users are likely to encounter any issues when using your site.

Cross-Platform and Cross-Browser Compatibility

It's also important to make sure that your site works well for users who don't user the same system as the one which your website was developed. Statistics show a steady growth in the use of alternative browsers and platforms (between June 2003 and June 2006 the use of Apple Macs doubled, for example). This is a very real issue - the UK government has already received strong, public criticism from the Technology Editor of the Guardian because of problems with the accessibility of it’s web services http://www.charlesarthur.com/blog/?p=727

Tagish will test your site on current versions of Windows, Apple Mac O/S and Linux, using a range of different versions of different web browsers and using agreed scenarios to ensure that your content and services are as widely usable as possible.

Assistive technologies

Any properly written, well coded website should work with any well written assistive technology. Tagish tests your website against suitability for use by assistive technology users by ensuring that there are no specific browser dependencies, that the flow of information on-screen is in a logical, consistent order, and that the technologies used by your site do not limit access to your content or services.

Multimedia Accessibility

All multimedia content should be accompanied by a text equivalent - we can arrange for this to be done, whether it is by on-screen captioning of existing multimedia, or by arranging for transcripts to be provided.

User-testing

Tagish can also arrange for user-testing to be carried out 'in the field' by everyday website users with disabilities, and who use a range of assistive technologies.
Please contact us if you are interested in this service.