DDA Compliance
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- flashbender0
Speaking of getting sued...
Target was sued by the National Foundation for the Blind in 2008 becasue of the non-accessible nature of their site. BEar in mind that I worked there at the time and they did not really make an effort to make it accessible.
After the lawsuit (which seems to have cost them about $6mil) the did make some changes to meet basic requirements - such as being more screen reader friendly.
- flashbender0
Never busted but the place I am now requires everything to be WCAG/WAI level 1/A. First level is not too hard but for AA you're pretty much designing something circa 1990.
I've found this online validator to be useful:
http://cynthiasays.com/
- flashbender0
There are also some accessibility addons for Firefox and Chrome which are pretty good too - just do a search for accessibility at the add-on place.
There is a screen reader emulator called 'Fangs' which is FF only,
http://www.standards-schmandards…
- Stugoo0
I'm very surprised at the amount of people that don't know about web accessibility laws, I had to cite legal to an account manager who tried to pry an accessibility statement from some wireframes I had drawn up.
To my knowledge, nobody has really been 'busted' for this, but you can get done. I think that the European standard is actually AA.
Cheers for the links flashbender.
- detritus0
Such laws are simply in place to guarantee a useful provision of service; To enforce some level of consideration for the specified sectors.
Government and local service are by default attuned to the needs of these sectors.. the private sphere just needs to ensure it's not going out of its way to deny service to the ‘less than abled’ or whatever.
I remember getting big into accessability around 2000/2001, when I was a web grunt. The effort/payoff balance has tipped around compromise ever since, and I can't think of anyone, ever, getting anywhere near busted. I lost interest thereafter.
.
tl;dr—no one will ever get ‘busted’ for this, unless they're going out of their way to deny service.
- Besides, common sense HTML-based coding alleviates many of the concerns. Like it always has.detritus
- microkorg0
I believe that River Island got into trouble from having an all-flash shop which isn't accessible to screenreaders etc and they ditched that site for an HTML one.
Everything we do complies to A/AA (sometimes AAA). It's become a habbit and I think it's best practise. Yup, it's a challenge to get a site that's accessible looking good designwise but isn't that what design is all about - the challenge and solution.
Yup, I like the challenge. It's usually clients that come back with "can we have that light grey ...." and i'll be like "yup, but it won't be accessible".With a lot of clients demanding an accessible site these days it's a good badge to have to say that everything we do is accessible. Rather than a "fuck you, design comes before accessibility" badge.
Get a good validator and something to check your colours & contrasts.