Accessibility
Almost one in five Australians have a disorder of some sort, whether they be blind, colour blind, motive impaired or mentally impaired. Their disorder should not restrict them from accessing your website which is why Shock Media Pty Ltd pays a great deal of attention to accessibility in every website developed. We apply the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) by using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to every one of our websites to ensure at least Phase 1 is meet.
The WAI is an accepted standard adopted by the W3 Consortium in order to provide greater levels of accessibility to all of the Internet's users. The Initiative carries a set of guidelines (WCAG) which determine whether or not a website is accessible and instructions on how to make it accessible. There are three phases in the WCAG; Phase 1 defines what must be implemented for a basic level of accessibility, Phase 2 describes what should be implemented and Phase 3 describes what may be implemented. Most of our projects will meet Phase 2 of this checklist, some cases such as our own website we have implemented Phase 3 which means www.shockmedia.com.au meets WAI AAA conformance.
While WAI sounds like a good initiative it is also part of Australian Law and all website's built after January 2000 must comply to at least WAI Phase 1 or face complaints and demands to upgrade. Furthermore it is compulsory for Australian Government to meet Phase 1 and all Queensland Government website's to meet Phase 2.
Standards
Not all Internet browsers work the same, some browsers may display a website differently from others, unless the website was written with standard compliment code. You may be familiar with the acronym HTML which means Hyper Text Mark-up Language, HTML is what transforms a website from simple lines of text into a graphical presentation. You can view the source of any website to see what HTML looks like. Shock Media uses the latest version of HTML which is called XHTML (eXtendable Hyper Text Mark-up Language). XHTML is less forgiving than traditional HTML in the sense that if a mistake has been made in the code, the page may not appear at all, this ensures that the code is well formed and contains no errors. Updates and development is made off-line so errors are picked up before the website is uploaded or updated, ensuring your pages remain constant across the site.
XHTML has three different methods; Transitional, Frameset and Strict, strict being the most comprehensive of the three. There are also two versions; 1.0 and 1.1, Shock Media writes all code using XHTML and in some cases we will use other standard technology incorporated into the standards such as MathML (Mathematics Mark-up Language) and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). To ensure all pages are 100% valid we use validators such as the W3 mark-up validator.
Although it is a major component of standards compliance, XHTML is not the only component that must validate. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is used to present graphical elements to a website while Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) provides a compact privacy policy enabling greater automatic trust to your site when it employs cookies or resisters sessions that holds a users shopping cart for instance.
Quality Assurance
All technologies whether it be XHTML, CSS, P3P, SVG, MathML, JavaScript, WAI or many other standard technologies must validate 100% in order to meet Shock Media's strict quality assurance guidelines. Our design team works extremely closely with the programming team to constantly find better ways to make our website's more accessible and our standards more compliant.