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Site Design

Overview

Web sites designed by Eris Associates (including this one!) conform to the latest standards for mark up, styling and accessibility.

We design sites to be accessible to all. Regardless of whether you are viewing in full colour graphics, with a text browser, with an audio browser, or are a robot parsing the page for a search engine it will be navigable and make sense!

Take a look yourself:

In a graphical browser
Shows the usual logos, tabs, multi-columns etc.
On print outs
Prints the data you want and leaves out the irrelevant navigation.
In text/audio browsers
Displays as simple lists and blocks of text. Graphical elements have descriptions. Extra navigation is offered to help you move around the document.
As source
Is correctly structured. Mark up isn't abused as layout. The real content comes at the beginning where search engines can find it easily.

Technologies and Standards

Document Markup

Valid XHTML 1.0!

Our sites conform to the XHTML 1.0 The Extensible HyperText Markup Language for their content structure. This is a stricter, better defined implementation of the older HTML standard that uses XML (although we do not currently use any XML specifics).

The formal definition of XHTML allows effective automated parsing, making the site more likely to be successfully transformed for display on mobile phones or by audio browsers (or screen readers) as well as giving the web crawlers used by search engines the best chance of finding, and indexing, meaningful content.

Document Styling

Valid CSS

Styling for display, print or speech is achieved using Cascading Style Sheets, (specifically CSS2.1). Keeping the styling separate from the document keeps the size of documents to a minimum (thus assisting download speeds) and allows them to be designed to be highly accessible.

Accessibility

Making sites accessible not only increases your audience but is actually a legal requirement in an increasing number of countries.

The overall design of our sites is tested against internationally recognised guidelines for accessibility.

Level Triple-A conformance icon,  W3C-WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

The World Wide Web Consortium is home to the Web Accessibility Initiative

We design to the Triple-A conformance level of the WAI's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines - the highest level - at all times.

Bobby WorldWide Approved AAA Bobby WorldWide Approved 508

Content Rating

The Internet Content Rating Association

The Internet Content Rating Association is an independent, non-profit organization whose mission is to develop, implement and manage an internationally acceptable voluntary self-rating system which provides internet users worldwide with the choice to limit access to content they consider harmful, especially to children. By including rating information as part of your website you ensure that it remains visible to the correct users when ICRA filtering is in effect.

 

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