The London Borough of Newham, was in need of content that enabled them to cater for people who were disabled by society; an e-learning programme was designed to enable them to deliver best practice towards their consumers who had challenges in accessibility.
So you were involved with the development of an e-learning program, computer based training software, which explained how important accessibility was.
Was that software accessible in itself? Could blind people working at Newham access it? Could people who were both deaf and blind working at Newham access it?
I understand my website isn't particularly to the standards which I have detailed in this debate - this is because at present I'm actually going through a development consultation of a new w3c compliant e-commerce website.
Your website is worse than not being w3c standards compliant, it is not accessible.
With your "12 years of industry knowledge" you should have spotted this when first setting up your website. With the amount of cheap or free hosted website builder packages out there like the Wix one you used (some Flash but more HTML), somebody with your knowledge of accessibility should have picked a more accessible solution in the first place.
Only then would you be in a better position to talk about accessibility on this forum. Having a website which is far less accessible than most member's websites on this forum is not a good position to be in if you are talking about how important web accessibility is.
If you have only spotted this recently, and web accessibility is important to you, but you like cheap hosted website builders for short term web solutions, then I suggest you move your site to a more accessible hosted website builder service (Wordpress.com, Microsoft Office Live, Google Sites, 123-reg's Instant Sitebuilder, Mr Site, etc), even for the short term (for the term before your new website arrives in May 2011).
I hope this link works, lets look at web accessibility from a knowledge sharing point
http://www.youtube.com/user/BSIBrit...erm=Watch+the+BSI+videos#g/c/D6E9F7CB9CA59E12
OK, so the British Standards Institute (BSI), whose motto is "Raising Standards Worldwide", have produced a video documentary explaining how important accessibility is, including accessibility on the web. But the BSI provide no text transcript of that video for people who are both deaf and blind, either on the youtube site or on their website, so they have not delivered their documentary in an accessible way.
Text transcripts of videos are not just useful for people who are both deaf and blind, but they are also useful for anyone trying to find this information via the search engines. Yes making your content, or site, search engine friendly can go quite a way towards accessibility, and just as providing alt text for images is a good thing (for both search engines and accessibility), so is doing it for videos in the form of text transcripts.
It is interesting to note just how much hypocrisy there is when it comes to the subject of accessibility.
