Resources > Accessibility
Website accessibility
Web accessibility is at the heart of every website we produce, and designed to conform to regulations set by the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.
It's not a case of political correctness, to us, it's simply common sense to design and develop websites that are legal, and accessible, to the largest possible audience (8 million registered disabled in the UK).
If you think this doesn't effect you, then you should follow the multi million dollar lawsuits currently taking place in the US.
The UK Government has set a target to have all its websites compliant by 2008, but anyone in the private sector could be sued today.
FREE 10 second site test - to see if your site complies
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an independent, non-profit organization which develops and promotes guidelines for the best practices in Web design, programming and construction.
One of their primary goals is universal access to the web – whatever a person's hardware, software, native language, culture, physical or mental ability.
You can run a full diagnostics test on your site, simply by going to W3C Website Validator and typing in the web address.
Within 10 seconds you will get the results: whether it has been correctly coded and programmed. Want to test your website? Go to W3C Markup Validator.
What does web accessibility really mean?
Since May 2005, every page of every site we have produced has been built to W3C requirements. But we don't stop there. We develop practical solutions that work in the real world.
• Text is set at a reasonable size and is coded so the reader can resize it in their browser.
• For clarity, we make sure that there is high contrast between the type colour and the background.
• Every image has an alt tag to describe it, so you can turn off the pictures and still make sense of the page.
• We use the latest XHTML and CSS code, and use design techniques that render across browsers, platforms and operating systems.
Northstar standard testing procedure
When you approve a website design you may think the work is over. In fact, this is where the hard work really starts.
Our programmers have to then ensure that the design you have approved reproduces in a range of operating systems, computers, resolutions, browsers and programmes. We have a bank of test computers: PCs and Macs with varying processor speeds dating back to 1997, with a wide variety of operating systems - from WINDOWS 95 to XP, and OS 8.5 to OSX Tiger.
Web designs that cross browsers, platforms and generations
Before we release any site onto the world wide web, we test it to destruction.
We run the website on PCs and Macs. We check it on different generations of browser: Internet Explorer 5.0 / 5.5 / 6.0 / 7.0, Netscape Navigator 4.8, Opera 9.0, Galoeon 2.0, Phenix 0.5, Konqueror 3.4 / 3.5, FireFox 1.0 / 1.5 / 2.0 / 3.0. Then we throw in a variety of operating systems for good measure: Linux, Windows and Mac.
This way we can ensure that a web design that looks great on your computer, will look just as good to Bill in Ohio with his dial up connection and a 1994 Commodore.
Then the site is viewed in all the different generations of browser, from Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator to Firefox, Safari and Opera.
Only once it has passed all these tests, does a Northstar site go online.
Further reading
"The Web: Access and Inclusion for Disabled People" by the Disability Rights Commission. Download (PDF File 408 KB).
Photograph reproduced by kind permission of Brian Smale. www.briansmale.com. All rights reserved.
