About the Accessibility Trustmark

Organisations demonstrate their commitment and conformance to industry standards such as Web accessibility, by placing a Segala Trustmark on their Web sites.

Segala’s Trust system contains 3 layers of trust, providing the most cost effective, flexible and highest degree of trust for accessibility and assertions about conformance to other standards and codes of conduct.

1. Visual Trustmark (badge, quality seal)
2. Visual certificate linked from the Trustmark
3. Content Label

Segala is the first company worldwide to provide a machine-readable Trustmark for accessibility, enabling compatible search engines and browsers to highlight Web sites that have been certified by Segala or one of it’s Certified Partners. This empowers end users to filter search results based on sites that contain Segala’s Trustmark.

Segala-Certified™ Trustmark

The Trustmark is a visual logo placed on certified Web pages. This enables a Web site owner to demonstrate that its Web site complies with Web accessibility standards & legislation. For example, organisations in the US may wish to display the certificate to demonstrate their conformance to Section 508.

This is also a common frame of reference for users to recognise accessible Web sites.

Certificate

The Certificate can be viewed when a user clicks on the Trustmark. This allows them to see what claims are being made about a specific page or site. It includes information about the Web site owner, domain, and unique certificate number, status of certificate and expiry date.

The certificate resides on Segala’s secure server for trust and to maintain authenticity.

Back to top

Maintaining quality

The Certificate provides end users with an option to report a misuse of the Trustmark directly to Segala, or a Certified-Partner if appropriate.

The reporting mechanism provides feedback to help Web site owners maintain their sites to the highest possible standards. It also prohibits the use of the Trustmark on a site that is making fraudulent claims about accessibility.

The reporting mechanism can also be used to remind clients that a change to their content may have inadvertently had an impact on the original claims. Segala will revoke a certificate if a site is unable to address non-compliance issues that are claimed if there is no alternative course of action. Segala will seek to work with Certificate holders to make adjustments that are needed to ensure the Certificate remains valid.

Content Labels

What are Content Labels?

Content Labels are files that contain metadata just like the title and description metadata contained within Web pages. Until now, users had to click through to Web sites before viewing conformance claims to a standard or code of conduct.

Content Labels can be read and utilised by search engines and browsers to display more information about a Web site in search results.

The extra information comes in the form of an icon beside each search result. Clicking on the icon displays a screen with the conformance claims made by the site owner. This means users can see which sites are making assertions about conformance to a particular standard such as accessibility without having to view lots of Web sites before finding one that is accessible to them.

Take a look at the screen shots from our Firefox extension to see how all of this actually works in practice. You can also download the extension and become a beta tester.

Back to top

What are the key benefits of Content Labels?

1. End users can filter search results to find sites that have been verified for accessibility compliance by Segala.
2. Site owners benefit from the positive PR and marketing through the trustworthiness that they promote online.
3. Agencies and developers benefit from giving clients a competitive advantage through search engine optimisation
4. Search engines and browsers benefit by providing more trustworthy and relevant search results.

Are Content Labels an open standard?

Segala’s method of labelling content is now moving onto a full recommendation track to become an official standard like HTML and SMILE and will be proposed as a replacement for PICS. PICS is the current (outdated) system used by Internet Explorer for filtering content today.

How does the 3 tier trust model work?

When a site has been certified for compliance Segala will provide you with a small code fragment to add to each certified page. This code calls the Trustmark logo from the Segala TrustServ™ and displays it on each certified page in the appropriate place.

The code also includes a link to the certificate so users can click on the Trustmark and view the conformance claims online.

Segala generates the Content Label and stores it on the TrustServ also. The process of linking the Web site to the Content Label is straightforward. There are two methods to link a site to a Content Label as seen below.

Option 1

(minor server configuration)
HTTP Response Header
Link: ; /=”/”; rel=”cLabel” type=”application/rdf+xml”;

Option 2

link rel=”meta” xhref=”http://www.segala.com/labels/segala_label_001.rdf” mce_href=”http://www.segala.com/labels/segala_label_001.rdf” type=”application/rdf+xml” title=”Segala label”

The optimum method is to configure the Web server (option 1) so you don’t need to add a Meta tag to each template or Web page. Both methods are very easy and quick to implement and Segala will provide you with assistance and support to implement these whenever necessary.

So, when a search engine or browser spiders the Web page, it notices Segala’s link tag pointing to the Content Label on our server. It then proceeds to read the metadata contained within the Content Label.

See lots of screen shots of sites highlighted in search results.

How can Segala help you?

• Accessibility benchmark evaluation report
• Accessibility compliance audit WCAG, DDA, Section 508 and more

Back to top