Are you responsible for maintaining your company’s Website? Or responsible for the design and build of your companies new Web site? New to the whole design and build game in general?

Have you heard of the W3C, Tim Berners-Lee, WAI or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines? No! not to worry.

Heres the skinny…

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential.

Tim Berners-Lee is the Director of the W3C and inventor of the World Wide Web.

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) works with organizations around the world to develop strategies, guidelines, and resources to help make the Web accessible to people with disabilities.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) developed by the WAI are guidelines widely regarded as the international standard for Web accessibility. They are also referred to as best practice guidelines

Over the years Segala has conducted many many independent audits of Web sites for accessibility compliance. This means we have manually checked if a Web site passes or fails the WCAG check points. Companies have engaged Segala to ensure their Web sites are compliant on the fear that they maybe excluding some users from accessing information within their Web site.

Below is a list of common issues found during some of those accessibility audits:

• Images have inappropriate alternative text
• Page sections don’t have their own headings
• Headings are incorrectly nested (H2 should follow H1, H3 should follow H2 etc)
• Link text does not make sense when read of out context
• A Focus state is not provided for links
• Form labels are missing or incorrectly positioned
• On-page items are incorrectly marked up in HTML
• Skip to main content link not provided
• Decorative elements are marked up in HTML code

To any developer well versed in the world of accessibility these issues are easy to over come. If the world of accessibility is new, you can sit down with a very large cup of coffee and try digest all the WCAG documents and working examples. It is possible and I would advise reading them and when finished read them again and again. After that take one guideline and apply it to your own Web site, baby steps.

Over the next few posts I’ll cover each bullet point above in more detail. Its very easy to pick up a bad habit, all I’m asking is that you develope the habit of considering accessibility when building a Web site.

I’m not going to quote guideline check point after check point. Instead I’m going to cover what is considered best practice and how people implement them in the real world.

Voting is now open for the Irish Internet Association Innovation Award.

The IIA Net Visionary Awards 2008 will be held on Thursday 30th October in the Great Hall, Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin. This is a gala, black tie evening. You can find more details about voting here.