design
accessibility
Ensuring that all the information on the site is accessible to all is one of the main goals. The company already prides itself in providing accessible software solutions, so their website has to be accessible. This will be done by conforming to the WCAG 1.0 standard at Priority Level Double-A.
To comply with this web standard the PSD site must do the following:
Priority Level A
- Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element.
- Ensure that all information that's conveyed with colour is also available without colour, for example, from context or markup.
- Clearly identify changes in the natural language of a document's text and any text equivalents (e.g. captions).
- Organize documents so that they may be read without style sheets. For example, when an HTML document is rendered without associated style sheets, it must still be possible to read the document.
- Ensure that equivalents for dynamic content are updated when the dynamic content changes.
- Avoid causing the screen to flicker.
- Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site's content.
- Ensure that pages are usable when scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects are turned off or not supported.
Priority Level Double-A
- Ensure that foreground and background colour combinations provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having colour deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen.
- When an appropriate markup language exists, use markup rather than images to convey information.
- Create documents that validate to published formal grammars.
- Use style sheets to control layout and presentation.
- Use relative rather than absolute units in markup language to attribute values and style sheet property values.
- Use header elements to convey document structure and user them according to specification.
- Mark up lists and list items properly.
- Mark up quotations. Do not use quotation markup for formatting effects such as indentation.
- Ensure that dynamic content is accessible or provide and alternative presentation or page.
- Do not cause popups or other windows to appear and do not change the current window without informing the user.
- Use W3C technologies when they are available and appropriate for a task and use the latest versions when supported.
- Avoid deprecated features of W3C technologies.
- Divide large blocks of information into more manageable groups where natural and appropriate.
- Clearly identify the target of each link.
- Provide metadata to add semantic information to pages.
- Provide information about the general layout (e.g., a site map or table of contents).
- Use navigational mechanisms in a consistent manner.
- Do not use tables for layout unless the table makes sense when linearized. Otherwise provide an alternative equivalent.
- For scripts and applets, ensure that event handlers are input device-independent.
- Ensure that any element that has its own interface can be operated in a device-independent manner.
- For scripts, specify logical event handlers rather than device-dependent event handlers.
- Until user agents allow users to freeze moving content, avoid movement in pages.
- Make programmatic elements such as scripts and applets directly accessible or compatible with assistor technologies.
The XHTML will also be validated to check for compliance with the XHTML 1.0 Strict recommendation.
style
Each page's presentation will be governed by an external style sheet. This will be done by inserting the following code into the "head" of each page:
<style type="text/css" media="all"> @import "css/layout.css"; </style> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="css/print.css" />
You may have noticed that there are two different style sheets linked to in that piece of XHTML. One will be applied only for printing, the other will be applied to all other media types. The style sheets will be completely original - personalised specially for Pipeline Software Development. They will both be validated using the W3C's CSS Validator.
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