There's a lot of things you might ask or even demand from the company that builds your web site. Certainly one of those things is that it should comply with the Disability Discrimination Act but you might also ask for, say a news page and a calendar of events.
But whilst it's very easy to have ideas at that point in proceedings, you should think about your ongoing commitment. There's nothing that makes a site look sadder and neglected than a news box on the front page that hasn't been updated for months or a calendar with nothing on it. It's important to ensure that somebody in your company - or perhaps someone outside it: your copywriter or marketing people - takes responsibility for that content and ensures it is updated regularly and with some care.
However, the main reason for this quick blog is to do with your responsibility for accessibility. Today we are sending out our latest newsletter, which is about accessibility and the DDA. In the newsletter we provide a link to a tool for checking accessibility and, of course, it occurred to us that a sharp client or two might use it to check our sites: our own and the ones we've built.
We were more than a little surprised at first to find some of them failing because we always check our sites for both W3C and DDA compliancy once they're finished. However, on closer inspection, we found that it was the user generated content that was causing the problem and not the code we'd written. That was, of course, a relief but then Louise asked whether we had even spoken to our clients about how to keep their content accessible. Well, that did take the smiles off our faces.
So, from next week, we will be briefing our existing clients on how to make sure that the content they put up is accessible and making sure that it's part of the training for our new ones.
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