Brighton-based Back 2 Balance Chiropractic Clinic recently built an accessible website on a shoestring budget. Using a freelance developer who used the WCAG as a resource, the small practice now has a non-Flash website which conforms to the A grade WAI requirements, and is accessible by patients of all ages and abilities.

Due to the heavy use of graphics on the clinic's primary website, the designer, Adam Bouqdib, followed the WCAG, and created a second website based on XHTML transitional tags. Among the work needed was adding text descriptions for every image on the main site and assigning labels to each input box.

The guidelines state that the second website needs to be updated as often as the main one. Bouqdib said, "To make sure it would always have the same content I wrote a template script. This way every page only exists once and is just displayed in two different layouts - the main design and the accessible one."

Web accessibility appears daunting at first, but once organisations understand the issues faced by disabled users, it ultimately boils down to the secret of all successful websites: good design.

Source: Computer Weekly | Date: 24/10/2006