how accessibility can help

Accessible websites allow disabled users to interact with the site in a way that's easy and manageable. Disabled users can be people with little or no vision, those without the means to use a mouse to navigate or older people with changing abilities due to aging.

Millions of potential users of your website are in some way disabled, yet this doesn't mean that they are in any way less of a resource to you. If you have blog, they still make up your readership; if you have an e-commerce website, they may still purchase products or services from you. Do you really want a site that doesn't take into account this huge portion of users, thereby not giving you the maximum results your site could be capable of?

Furthermore, there are laws governing how users should be able to interact with a website. The Disability Discrimination Act has been in place for more than 10 years, but has only recently started to become prominent. A partially blind person in America recently successfully sued a large retailer over its inaccessible website. They won $150,000.

accessible by design

At pogdesign we know the responsibility of making websites accessible to as many people as possible falls to us, the developer. If accessibility isn't built into the site from the start, there is no magic cure for this. A new broswer won't help, and a third party plugin cannot solve the issue.

That's why we build sites to be accessible from the very start.

how to check

All of our sites are made to comply with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines for a standard that was initially unconnected to accessibility. XHTML is a reworking of HTML that organises the very structure of a website into a more human readable version when not styled. It uses a CSS sheet to visually style the page, instead of letting tables determine where the information is shown. This leads to a webpage that is more content based, that loads faster, that is better in search engines and that is better for things like screen readers, which help blind users. Our sites generally conform to XHTML ver. 1.0 Strict, which while not being the highest "level" of XHTML, is, we feel, the best for the maximum users.

Our sites also pass every test under the Section 508 Web Accessibility Guidelines, which means our sites are compliant with the WCAG Priorities 1, 2 and 3. 

In short, our sites pass every measure that we current have for determining if a site is accessible by people with disabilities.

using this site

As well as working in all browsers and screenreaders, should you be unable to work with a mouse, you can jump to the various main sections using Access Keys. Anywhere you see a letter underlined (if you have styles enabled) or a single italic letter (if styles are disabled) you can press ALT+Accesskey. On the Mac, you would use CTRL+Accesskey (not COMMAND+Accesskey, which can produce undesired effects).

• Main page (Home) : Accesskey = H
• Services page : Accesskey = S
• Portfolio page : Accesskey = P
• Website Design page : Accesskey = W
• E-Commerce page : Accesskey = E
• SEO page : Accesskey = O
• Get A Quote page : Accesskey = Q