Venda Standards

Accessibility

Venda is committed to providing fully accessible websites that are usable by everyone. We strive to build sites in accordance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) of the World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C WAI). These guidelines are recognised as the standard in Europe and across the world. We also follow accessibility best practices and web standards as defined by the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) in the UK and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act in the US.

Standard accessibility features:

Forms

We implement labels, fieldsets and legends for all forms to aid screen reader users.

Server-side errors are as prominent as possible (usually in red text at the top of the content area).

Images

We use meaningful alt attributes (alt tags) on all content images. Decorative images (e.g. corner graphics) have no alt attributes.

JavaScript

We strive to ensure our sites work if JavaScript is disabled. However, some of our checkout pages are currently reliant on JavaScript.

Navigation

We include a “skip to content” link at the top of every page to assist users of screen readers and text-only browsers who may want to jump down to the beginning of the content area.

If the context of a link is not clear, we use title attributes to describe where the link points to.

Site Map

A site map provides information about the structure of products, pages and stories on the site. A link can be positioned in the header/footer.

Tables

We use cascading style sheets (css) for layouts as opposed to tables.

When tables are used for their intended purpose (tabular data), we use labels and associate headers with their respective rows and columns to accommodate screen reader users.

Text Size

Relative font sizes are used to allow users to scale text size. Users can usually alter the text size via the “View” menu in their browser (depending on the browser).

Visual Design

When designing sites, we aim to ensure foreground/background colours contrast enough to assist site-impaired users. We raise contrast issues with third party designs if we believe this is necessary.

Our sites are built to avoid horizontal scrollbars at 800x600 screen resolution, as long as the design is no wider than 760px.

Web Standards

We use structured, semantic markup to separate content from look and feel (e.g. h1 tags for headings, p tags for paragraphs). If style sheets aren’t loaded (e.g. a user is using an older browser or a screen reader) the user can still read content in the intended order but without the design applied.

Non-standard accessibility features (that can be requested for each site):

Access Keys

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by pressing a combination of keys defined on the site. (On Windows, press ALT + [access key]; on Macintosh, press CTRL + [access key].)
There are no standard access keys as such, but we can implement the following or similar on request:

Access key h = Home page

Access key a = About

Access key c = Contact Us

Access key s = Search

Further reference:

World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C WAI)

http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/

http://www.w3.org/WAI/References/QuickTips/

Disability Discrimination Act (UK)

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1995/1995050.htm

Section 508, Rehabilitation Act (US)

http://www.section508.gov/