Knoc Website Design and Marketing

Website design with more thought

This website, along with all of the websites that knoc produce, is designed with accessibility at it's core.

There are a number of reasons why accessibility is important;

Legally, the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 and it's predecessor in 1995 make it illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities, be they your current or future employees or your customer.
Financially, by making your site available and usable by the most people possible you are increasing your potential customer base, over 10% of UK residents have a disability!
Generally, if your site is designed with usability in mind, with clear navigation, correct page structure and sensible organisation, then it is easier for all users to use and for search engines to crawl, meaning more chance of it generating leads.
Socially, we should all be creating design options which are inclusive, be it a drinks carton that an arthritic hand can open or a website that someone who is dyslexic can use, so that no-one is excluded unnecessarily.

Here are some important accessibility features which will be included in your website unless there are exceptional circumstances;

Styled using CSS making the site easier for text-readers and text-only browsers to read.
High contrast colours for text.
All text uses relative sizes making it easy to re-size for varying user viability requirements.
Clearly differentiated hyperlinks.
All images have an ALT attribute in case they are not viewed a graphic.
Meet Priority One criteria from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and all other guidelines where possible.

Here are some further resources if you are interested in finding out more about accessibility;

Finally here is a list of some popular internet browsers which offer different accessibility options;

Designers can often create things as if the user will have the same understanding that they do. They don't!

Here are some things you might not know;

Press Backspace to go back one page.

Press Shift and Backspace to go forward one page.

Press Tab to move to the next page item, maybe to the next form field. Again, adding Shift reverses this.

Press F5 to refresh a web page.

Press F11 to view a web page full screen.

Press the Space Bar or End button to go to the bottom of the page (not when using a form!).

Use Shift with the Space Bar or the Home key to get back to the top.

Use your arrow keys and Page Up and Page Down to scroll up and down.