e-stores should be W3C Compliant

cmcp

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What a load of rubbish.

Accessibility is yet another layer of problems for a web designer to over come.

No, it's not. If you understand how to build a website correctly it's not an obstacle.

and then you have to make sure everyone can access it correctly.

Again, if you know what you're doing this will be intrinsic to the process. Many would argue it comes first.

The problem with accessibility re: partially sighted, is that you go from having a rainbow of colour schemes to having a handfull of them to use in your pallette. In the end, you may as well just stick up black text on a white background and have nothing else on the website because of the restrictions you're faced with.

The problem with "accessibility" is people not understanding what it is at the most basic level.

Do you really think that accessibility is specifically targeting those with a disability by making fonts larger, certain colours etc? It's about building your website in such a way that there's no barriers to change these attributes. It's about marking up the front end so it makes sense to all devices including screen readers. Using appropriate alt text on images, using all elements correctly so the page structure makes sense.
 
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Yes but you won't get that across ALL websites. It's like saying we should introduce a tax on those who do not make websites W3C compliant. In which case, prepare for price hikes from all designers as it takes longer to build a website like that than a basic html/css site designed with imagery and content in mind.

It's no heavy task adding Alt Tags these days, it's simple and a normal practice. But trying to follow yet more guidelines, then making your website appear on as many browser types as possible and confirming that this works takes time and therefore money to get right.

You can build a basic website, template style, html/css for a client, 2/3 pages for less than £100 but you cannot guarantee that it reaches 99% of end users. You can check that it reaches the majority of the mass market by testing it on several browser types but if you have to make it available for ALL viewing possibilities then you're stuffed.

How do you account for peoples screen resolution and contrast? people have it set to different levels for each computer. Those who use PCs alot tend to have the contrast and brightness down a tad, those who hardly use the computer have the brightness turned right up or left as standard straight out of the box.

Trying to account for all of this and then trying to account for another market (probably less than 15% i'd guess) is hard going and ultimately costs more time.
 
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cmcp

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People with disabilities are not another market they are real people, just like you and me. As long as a website is built correctly no special requirements are needed.

Yes but you won't get that across ALL websites. It's like saying we should introduce a tax on those who do not make websites W3C compliant. In which case, prepare for price hikes from all designers as it takes longer to build a website like that than a basic html/css site designed with imagery and content in mind.
What are you talking about? None of this makes sense to me. Are you suggesting that a basic HTML / CSS site is different from this mystical "accessible option"? It's not rocket science.

Web accessibility means people with disabilities can use the web just like anyone else. I'm not talking about visual aids on pages. Did you read my last comment?

Do you really think that accessibility is specifically targeting those with a disability by making fonts larger, certain colours etc? It's about building your website in such a way that there's no barriers to change these attributes. It's about marking up the front end so it makes sense to all devices including screen readers. Using appropriate alt text on images, using all elements correctly so the page structure makes sense.

Anyone who has read any HTML spec should know how to markup a page correctly. The upshot of the story is anyone who can't is probably a self taught bedroom bandit.

It's no heavy task adding Alt Tags these days, it's simple and a normal practice. But trying to follow yet more guidelines, then making your website appear on as many browser types as possible and confirming that this works takes time and therefore money to get right.
Build valid HTML and CSS and your website will render correctly in all browsers.

How do you account for peoples screen resolution and contrast? people have it set to different levels for each computer. Those who use PCs alot tend to have the contrast and brightness down a tad, those who hardly use the computer have the brightness turned right up or left as standard straight out of the box.
Why would I need to account for that?
 
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I won't carry your quotes across as its getting hard for people to read everything.

I've W3C validated a lot of websites. I'm yet to see any increase in conversions from this in comparison to when the websites were not validated. Apart from those websites specifically designed for an audience that we think will have difficult reading the print (edited)

When building a website for those with poor eye sight or blurry vision or whatever it may be you have to be careful of certain colours clashing. Now, this may be true across ALL websites..i don't know..but mixing colous like reds against greys (certain depths of grey) can make it difficult to read text..whether that affects normal sight as well as poor sight i don't know..but its another set of things we have to consider to put in to a website when designing it.

All websites should carry the correct markups, no tags should be left incomplete, alt tags should be in place, this is standard practice and i'm not disagreeing with that but i'm disagreeing on visual quality....some websites that are seen as visually appealing to those with good sight can be seen as a blur of colours with those for poor sight..should they change the website to a more standard format to accommodate this? would that risk conversion for those who like the advanced colour schemes and visualisations?

Why would you need to account for screen resolution and brightness? you cannot account for it..but this is what i'm saying...you can try and please all of the people but it's virtually impossible. We see it on these forums all the time, 'oh i like the black' ... 'well i don't mate' ....'can you make it pink instead' .... 'i dont like pink..i want it manly..like a hairy wilderbeast'
 
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cmcp

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some websites that are seen as visually appealing to those with good sight can be seen as a blur of colours with those for poor sight..should they change the website to a more standard format to accommodate this? would that risk conversion for those who like the advanced colour schemes and visualisations?
Thank you for validating a point I've repeated twice already. Please read my last part in bold.

I'm not suggesting you build a 1 website with 1 style to cater for the visually impaired, but I'm not repeating myself again.

When building a website for those with poor eye sight or blurry vision or whatever it may be you have to be careful of certain colours clashing. Now, this may be true across ALL websites..i don't know..but mixing colous like reds against greys (certain depths of grey) can make it difficult to read text..whether that affects normal sight as well as poor sight i don't know..but its another set of things we have to consider to put in to a website when designing it.
I'm quite aware of that, given I build accessible websites for a living. You don't seem to grasp the fundemental concept that a large part of an accessible website lies in the markup. Screen readers read markup.
 
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cmcp

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Just so we're clear, this point

Do you really think that accessibility is specifically targeting those with a disability by making fonts larger, certain colours etc? It's about building your website in such a way that there's no barriers to change these attributes. It's about marking up the front end so it makes sense to all devices including screen readers. Using appropriate alt text on images, using all elements correctly so the page structure makes sense.

You keep suggesting that accessibility is about an on screen visual for the disabled. It's not.

You've demonstrated that you think accessibility is about making fonts large, giving elements huge padding, making colour schemes with highest contrast etc. This is wrong.
 
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I won't carry your quotes across as its getting hard for people to read everything.

I've W3C validated a lot of websites. I'm yet to see any increase in conversions from this in comparison to when the websites were not validated.

That's all well and good, and my hat goes off to you. But the main reason why you haven't experienced any increase in conversions; is because you haven't marketed the sites in the most relevant areas - or despite your websites being "accessible" the products or services may not be; this in itself is another can of worms.

But if the marketing strategy is applied correctly then I feel you would observe a greater return of investment.
 
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Radical thinking here, but if there was a body supported by law that had the powers to close your website down due to it not being accessible...plus imposing large fines and having your business presented in the National Papers for demonstrating discrimination - How many of you would deter this event from happening?

Er let me think now.

None.

now that was easy.

is this watch with mother.?:)

Earl
 
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Well that brings us neatly back to the start. A consultant (with 12 years experience, loads of evidence and yadda yadda), is in favour of draconian legislation to force people to use his services, or services like his.

Yippee.

Maybe we'll get a Quango too, with fully accessible six figure salaries and the rest...
 
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movietub

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It's possible that Earl got his negatives mixed up and in fact meant the he would not be in support of such a scheme/law...

But anyway, I'm 100% against anything which pressurises designers in any way to be compliant all the time. As it is, the will and ingenuity of the designer is pushing the boundaries and the industry, including agreed standards, are kept actively trying to keep up.

That's why the websites designed two years ago already look surprisingly dated. And it's why CSS3 is already supported and used very frequently despite only being a draft spec. Without the red tape progress is relentless. That's a good thing! And the problems that come with having no standards enforced, tend to solve themselves anyway. Websites will always be generally well accessible, they have to be to make money.

Does every website need to work on every mobile device? Well less and less now that mobile devices are developing to keep pace. Why change many billion websites when a few devs working on the mobile devices can simply develop browsers which display a site as if it were rendered on a normal size screen? Safari on the iPhone solved about 90% such problems overnight. And that was only the first attempt at solving the problem.

Keep red tape for the off-line world. That's where the people that enjoy red tape seem to want to live out there days anyway. Those of us that chase progress tend to see the internet as a good thing, and we can cope fine and maintain what we have without a rule book on every subject.
 
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Radical thinking here, but if there was a body supported by law that had the powers to close your website down due to it not being accessible...plus imposing large fines and having your business presented in the National Papers for demonstrating discrimination - How many of you would deter this event from happening?

I would take my business elsewhere. Net neutrality of all forms must be maintained. I don't agree with discriminatory websites but the internet should always allow that freedom to exist.

The same rules that apply to brick and mortar stores simple can't be applied to the internet. You have no built in immediate custom and users have no built in right to access it. Unlike a Supermarket or Mechanics etc I don't have to care about the people who live near me if I don't want to.

If a person wishes to ban all Scottish people from their website then so be it. They pay for the server, the bandwidth and the development costs and they are the one who is going to absorb the costs of lost custom.
 
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cmcp

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Movietub you seem to be leaning on the CSS3 spec and you know what, I agree with you. Whilst I endeavour to write clean, efficient, accessible code I'm content when my CSS (sometimes, rarely) doesn't validate. This usually happens because the only option to have both validate would be to compromise on the structure of the HTML.

There's two separate subjects in this thread: W3C valid code and web accessibility.

IMO whilst they are complimentary it's not ideal to try and discuss the two alongside one another, as people don't have a thorough grasp of both. That's been demonstrated with web accessibility.

For the record, you can have a fully W3C compliant site which is not accessible, and you can have a fully accessible site which is not W3C compliant.
 
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Well that brings us neatly back to the start. A consultant (with 12 years experience, loads of evidence and yadda yadda), is in favour of draconian legislation to force people to use his services, or services like his.

Yippee.

Maybe we'll get a Quango too, with fully accessible six figure salaries and the rest...

No Dawg, I'm not promoting my services in any way. I just opened the debate with a question.

It is easy to observe that the SME sector clearly require a channel of education that helps them to observe the business benefits of being accessible, not just on-line but in the products they may manufacture or sell.

It has been evident in some respects that "Accessibility", "Disability" and "Best Practice" is an alien language; and there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding.

I understand that the Corporate sector have the resources to deliver accessibility initiatives, and Mr Dawg and Co do not.

Without sounding patronising, Mr / Miss Mrs SME have the mindset...I have a product / service, a marketing budget that will optimize my website - that will get me sales...and help me pay the bills and make a tidy sum for myself.

Nothing wrong with the aforementioned.

But if there was a poll conducted, I would imagine that x percent of SME's would like to stand out amongst the rest; have a competitive advantage; having the ability to serve a diverse customer base rather than the average.

Increasing their customer base, you tend to forget, the disabled community can recommend a minimum of 2 new customers - yet at the same time they could say don't shop there, they have very poor customer service, that in itself can damage your business and reputation!

But if you are more "Disability Aware" word of mouth becomes a very powerful marketing tool.

Lets just say, if you give me the Local Council that your business operates in. I could give you a figure of visually impaired people that live in that ward.

For arguments sake, if you delivered your products and services that met their needs, and strategically marketed them in the relevant sectors; and you had an in-house awareness, in order to serve this particular market - I know that you will obtain an increase in business.

I know you will not do this, due to your closed mind...why don't you want too increase your customer base...maybe you can not cope with the increase in demand?
 
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movietub

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If a person wishes to ban all Scottish people from their website then so be it. They pay for the server, the bandwidth and the development costs and they are the one who is going to absorb the costs of lost custom.

At a glance many people would say that would be unforgivable discrimination. But putting aside political correctness, what damage would it do? Sure the odd scot might be offended, but then what? What damage does being offended actually do? Does your head fall off if you are offended? Do you get herpes?

No. All that the said offended scot would do is stick two fingers up to the website and look elsewhere. It's called voting with your feet. You don't need a rule book to stop people discriminating deliberately or due to ignorance. If they discriminate too much, their site fails anyway.

Setting up a website selling glasses that does not maintain it's usability when the text size is increased, does in no way make it harder for people that wear glasses to buy glasses on-line. It simply reduces that sites market share and another site will move in to it.
 
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The question asked if any of us would deter the law from happening.

You answered no, on behalf of us all.

Is Sir a dictator now? :D

Dictatorship isn't the topic of debate here.

Have you all reached your capacity in serving your existing customer base?...If so other businesses can accommodate your loss! They will not mind in taking your potential customers, conversions and sales.

Imagine if you could have a share of 650 million new customers, imagine if you could implement new personnel and departments to cover this market share...imagine being an entrepreneur.
 
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T

TotallySport

No Dawg, I'm not promoting my services in any way. I just opened the debate with a question.

It is easy to observe that the SME sector clearly require a channel of education that helps them to observe the business benefits of being accessible, not just on-line but in the products they may manufacture or sell.

It has been evident in some respects that "Accessibility", "Disability" and "Best Practice" is an alien language; and there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding.

I understand that the Corporate sector have the resources to deliver accessibility initiatives, and Mr Dawg and Co do not.

Without sounding patronising, Mr / Miss Mrs SME have the mindset...I have a product / service, a marketing budget that will optimize my website - that will get me sales...and help me pay the bills and make a tidy sum for myself.

Nothing wrong with the aforementioned.

But if there was a poll conducted, I would imagine that x percent of SME's would like to stand out amongst the rest; have a competitive advantage; having the ability to serve a diverse customer base rather than the average.

Increasing their customer base, you tend to forget, the disabled community can recommend a minimum of 2 new customers - yet at the same time they could say don't shop there, they have very poor customer service, that in itself can damage your business and reputation!

But if you are more "Disability Aware" word of mouth becomes a very powerful marketing tool.

Lets just say, if you give me the Local Council that your business operates in. I could give you a figure of visually impaired people that live in that ward.

For arguments sake, if you delivered your products and services that met their needs, and strategically marketed them in the relevant sectors; and you had an in-house awareness, in order to serve this particular market - I know that you will obtain an increase in business.

I know you will not do this, due to your closed mind...why don't you want too increase your customer base...maybe you can not cope with the increase in demand?
Sorry but you say you started a debate, but I think your more on a crusade and although trying to do something good, I think your not looking for both sides of the arrgument, on your comments you have successfully closed down many small business and also stopped many business from opening with you consessions, and many of the business won't even need these features for some time.

Your stats are way off, yes providing different options can lead to building customers but not the figures your talking about, and while its all well and good you consulting large business, even you had no idea the true impact on real SME.

My point about Glide was mainly about finding out the number of Disabled people who needed accessability options built into a web site, as many disabled people simply won't.

Anyway I have no matter discussing the issue and no problem with frank speak, but I normally expect some give and take and although I was looking for the information so I can look into it further, your clearly not going to look at it from the business point of view and in the real world.

So thats it from me on this discussion, but I hope you and your wife had a good weekend:)
 
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movietub

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Dictatorship isn't the topic of debate here.

Have you all reached your capacity in serving your existing customer base?...If so other businesses can accommodate your loss! They will not mind in taking your potential customers, conversions and sales.

Imagine if you could have a share of 650 million new customers, imagine if you could implement new personnel and departments to cover this market share...imagine being an entrepreneur.

That's like saying 'imagine if you paid £10,000 to learn to fly, you could save money on aerial photography!' Sure, but I probably won't ever want enough aerial photographs to make the saving.

Lets look at our new e-commerce site that's currently being finished. The amount of time needed to fettle it until its fully accessible would be considerable. And it's not a one off cost. Each day pages of content (some of which is dynamic) are added, edited or removed.

The only way to do this would be to have a full time website manager constantly pulling the ever developing site back in to shape. And that £30k+ cost could instead go into marketing or being more competitively priced. Both these things will yield me a much better ROI than knowing that the partially sighted can still read all our pages on a 6 year old smart phone.

Your argument is flawed in two ways. 1) You may be right that extra customers can be attracted, but the same money/effort can be employed to attract even more customers in other ways. The pot of cash is not infinite, and your proposal ranks no where near high enough for most of us. 2) I'm far from convinced you can have a cutting edge/modern styled site that is fully accessible without spending A LOT of extra time developing it. And even then some desirable layouts simply cannot be fully accessible.

Most importantly of all, as I said earlier, if none of us do anything about it then those with out of date browsers are more likely to update them. Small screen devices are more likely to continue developing down the route of mimicking bigger screen rendering of sites. Browser text zoom will continue to get more intelligent.

You may well have 'a point'. The problem is, you haven't applied it to real world businesses very well at all. Who's going to invest in something if they can make much more of a return by investing in something else?
 
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Maybe it is just an uneasy relationship with the language, but you just don't come across at all well, a certainly not credibly as a consultant.
A few points (in bold):

No Dawg, I'm not promoting my services in any way. I just opened the debate with a question.
Where have we heard this tired old trope before? " Moi? Little me? I'm just opening a debate that I happen to have a financial interest in."
It is easy to observe that the SME sector clearly require a channel of education that helps them to observe the business benefits of being accessible, not just on-line but in the products they may manufacture or sell.

It has been evident in some respects that "Accessibility", "Disability" and "Best Practice" is an alien language; and there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding.
Not only patronising, thinking as you seem to that you know other peoples' businesses better than they do, but you seem to think nobody else has grasped the concept of accessibility, done any research into it, considered it, weighed up pros and cons. Maybe it's just me, maybe I'm scratchy, but I have spent hours and hours looking at this, conferring with organisations and customers as well as finding out about the law and how it is applied, and I find your attitude irritating. Which is a Word of Mouth no-no, as you know.

I understand that the Corporate sector have the resources to deliver accessibility initiatives, and Mr Dawg and Co do not.

Without sounding patronising, Mr / Miss Mrs SME have the mindset...I have a product / service, a marketing budget that will optimize my website - that will get me sales...and help me pay the bills and make a tidy sum for myself.

Nothing wrong with the aforementioned.
You not only sound patronising but as mentioned above your use of figures and examples is banal. You have even got your audience wrong FFS: the vast majority on this forum are micro business, not even the 'S' of SME...
Had you provided evidence, as asked, you might have been more convincing.

But if there was a poll conducted, I would imagine that x percent of SME's would like to stand out amongst the rest; have a competitive advantage; having the ability to serve a diverse customer base rather than the average.
Safe bet. So safe as to be meaningless. I'll bet that if a poll was conducted 100% of SMEs would say they would like to have a competitive advantage. Big deal. Bears crap in woods.

Increasing their customer base, you tend to forget, the disabled community can recommend a minimum of 2 new customers - yet at the same time they could say don't shop there, they have very poor customer service, that in itself can damage your business and reputation!

But if you are more "Disability Aware" word of mouth becomes a very powerful marketing tool.

Lets just say, if you give me the Local Council that your business operates in. I could give you a figure of visually impaired people that live in that ward.

For arguments sake, if you delivered your products and services that met their needs, and strategically marketed them in the relevant sectors; and you had an in-house awareness, in order to serve this particular market - I know that you will obtain an increase in business.
This comes down to " I know that you will obtain an increase in business". But you don't know at what cost do you? Or whether it would be worthwhile. You are just saying it because it fits your agenda.

I know you will not do this, due to your closed mind...why don't you want too increase your customer base...maybe you can not cope with the increase in demand?
Here we are back on the 'how to win friends and influence people' bit. Its all a rerun of " I have an opinion, you are a bigot; I am right-thinking, you have a closed mind". Brilliant bit of consultant communication there bud: tell the punters they are arses and they'll come running.

And, again, where is your accessible website? Do you even have a website? A quick Google for 'Johnson and Johnson Consultants' doesn't seem to throw up much. Unless you are very accessible on page 14...
 
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movietub

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To sum up then:


  • The OP's own site fails his own standard.
  • The web designers on here admit to sending out sites not fully accesible.
  • The online retailers admit to not caring that much. We have the customers real needs to concern ourselves with.
  • No one has been convinced the effort is worth the investment.
  • We are all agreed this is a plug for the OP, not a balanced debate at all.
Fail.
 
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J

Jeff Knows

JohnsonandJohnson (jandjc dot co dot you-k) in my professional opinion I'm afraid your website barely scrapes a pass.

I said before I applaud your sentiment, but it goes down the drain when you deliver it with such attitude.

You went quite some way to disguise that link, lol.

Not only is that a terrible flash site, it's a terrible template based site from Wix, specialists at giving anyone the tools to ruin the web it seems. Also funny, if you turn Javascript off the entire site is reduced to the 3 header images.

There is no way you can possibly consult on anything web standard when your own website is an out of the box free template system built on flash that fails at the first hurdle.
 
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movietub

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A little off topic, but I think I've just found one of the top 10 best sites I have seen for accesability!

X-factor's site. Try increasing the text size and marvel at how well it behaves! It's a very, very good site all round in fact. Some proper flair with CSS as well. Such as the pop out :hover styles, swapping z-index applied to the linked divs in the main content area. Thats stylish and forces the eye onto the text and image the cursor hovers on.

It even proves that a site can be artistically stunning, modern AND also simple to navigate and clear. A trick that many designers (sorry but true) dismiss as impossble, instead asking their clients to choose one or the other...

Bloody good site.
 
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quikshop

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For arguments sake, if you delivered your products and services that met their needs, and strategically marketed them in the relevant sectors; and you had an in-house awareness, in order to serve this particular market - I know that you will obtain an increase in business.

I know you will not do this, due to your closed mind...why don't you want too increase your customer base...maybe you can not cope with the increase in demand?

I think you've approached this debate from a slightly skewed angle. The legal requirements for making a website accessible are a no-brainer. Those that comply have a convincing USP within their market that builds good feeling towards the website.

Commercially its a non-starter. To talk of product changes to meet a vague losely defined market and in-house awareness which means training - the costs alone would more than outweigh any perceived gain in sales.

You do come across as a good consultant though. Strong view point, a convincing argument to the layman and plenty of loosely related but not specifically relevant figures to bandy about :D
 
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movietub

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www.jandjc.co.uk - enough said.

At least this consultation was free! :)

It's a very bad site. About as accesible as Cheryl Coles knickers, sadly.

I especially love the bit - 'Logo's and Profiles are inteactive - click to obtain further information'. In other words, the graphic is clickable... Except for the second one, which isn't. Not really interactive at all in fact.

And the logos are low quality images stretched. And they are out of proportion. And nothing lines up.

Hmm.
 
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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

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.

This will also be tied in with an accessible APP over all platforms, and the cost of this a mere £70,000.

I can make this evident via private message. If you require the evidence.
 
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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.

This will also be tied in with an accessible APP over all platforms, and the cost of this a mere £70,000.



Blimey your gonna have to sell a lot of matches to get that back.:eek::)

Earl
 
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