Recent Work
Tamar Valley Tourism Association
The River Tamar, together with its tributaries the Rivers Tavy and Lynher, forms part of the ancient border between the counties of Cornwall and Devon. The River runs almost sixty miles from the north coast near Bude, south to Plymouth S...
Accessibility
"Can't recommend them highly enough. Mainly because they listen to your ideas and concerns and help you realise what you want from your site. Then they bring it to light!"
Coombe Gallery
Since 1999 the passing of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) has meant that websites have a legal obligation to be accessible to disabled people. With the Code of Practice for the Act published in 2002 and Part III of the Act published in October 2004, it has now become very difficult to avoid this reponsibility.
Employers are now legally obliged to make all their services accessible including web sites, intranets and extranets.
How does it apply to web sites?
Websites will most commonly be covered when they constitute the provision of a service. The example quoted by the Act is an airline company providing a flight reservation and booking service to the public on its web site. It is important to remember that it is the provision of the service which is affected by Part III of the Act and not the nature of the service or business or the type of establishment from which it is provided.Failure to comply
A disabled person can make a claim against you if your web site makes it impossible or unreasonably difficult to access information and services. If you have not made reasonable adjustments and cannot show that this failure is justified, then you may be liable under the Act, and may have to pay compensation and be ordered by a court to change your site. It is likely that anyone taking this action would have the backing of the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) and/or the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB).The RNIB has recently been involved in two such cases, one of which was the subject of county court proceedings. These are the first court proceedings in the UK which we are aware of that related in any way to the provision of a service on the web. Currently the RNIB is working on potential cases involving website accessibility on behalf of other blind and partially sighted people under the DDA.
Level of compliance
At Integralvision we recommend that websites achieve at least the basic level of compliance that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend in their Web site Accessibility Guidelines (WAG) version 1.0. Certain type of sites: local government, education and other high profile sites should be aiming to achieve a minimum double AA compliance.Integralvision has recently created templates for the new Dartmoor National Park Authority web site to achieve double AA compliance. All our sites built since October 2004 have been built to the basic level of compliance that the W3C recommend. Our own web site has undergone a complete rebuild to achieve compliance.