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Accessibility

What does web accessibility mean?

Making a website accessible involves creating an equivalence of access for all your users. It means thinking carefully about the information and content that you want to provide and carefully considering the way that you actually provide it. Making text available only as graphics is not an accessible solution, for example, and neither is creating a website using Flash - neither can be properly used by a visually impaired person.

It’s not just about providing a 'text only' version for blind or visually impaired people. There are many different categories of users who should be considered by you and provided for where possible. People to think about (in additon to your users with perfect sight and motor skills) are:

1. Visually impaired users
2. Disabled / motor impaired users (older users can often have issues which make it difficult to navigate using a mouse)
3. People who use your site a lot but who have now broken their arm, for example, and find the browsing experience is suddenly very, very different for them.
4. People with learning difficulties or with poor English

Accessibility is about providing equal access to information to all your users.

What does this mean for my website?

If your website has a public service remit you will be required at some point in the near future to ensure that it is developed properly for all your users.

Our Government is committed to implementing the eEurope Action Plan 2005, which involves designing websites using the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines. By the end of this year, member states, including Ireland, will need to ensure that public service websites are accessible.

Even if your website does not have a public service remit now is the time to start thinking about providing accessible web solutions to all your users.

What can Eclipse do to help me?

We can take your exisiting website and give it an accessibility overhaul or we can create a new accessible website for you from scratch. We design and develop using WAI standards for XHTML and CSS code, which give your website the best possible chance of being accessible across browsers, platforms and devices. We also pay particular attention to site structure and navigation architecture as these play a large and important role in making the information on your site easy and quick to find.

We can implement many useful accessibility features within your pages to provide alternative means of navigation and help to all your users - not all web users use a mouse to navigate through webpages, for example.

We can provide you with one easy to maintain website which will satisfy all accessibility requirements as laid down by the WAI, the Irish National Disability Authority and the Irish Government.

Who have we done this for?

In the past 6 months we have provided accessible solutions to:

• NUI Maynooth
• Cork City Council
• Cork City Libraries
• The Library Council of Ireland
• Library.ie
• Tipperary Joint Libraries Committee
• Department of Media Studies, NUI Maynooth

with many others currently under development. If you are interested in finding out more about our accessibility services, please contact us.

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