Accessibility
Very New Media is committed to providing accessible content for disabled users, as per the Disability Discrimination Act (“DDA”) of 1995. This document is intended to describe our Accessibility policy, and we aim to ensure that our activities keep within the spirit of this policy and the aims of the DDA.
The Disability Discrimination Act & Web Access Report
The DDA was written in 1995, the final stage of which came into place in October 2004. The final stage of the DDA states that, by law, “service providers may have to consider making permanent [physical] adjustments to their premises” and information services, specifically mentioning websites and online resources. The duties stated in the final stage apply to “service providers where [physical] features make access to their services impossible or unreasonably difficult for disabled people”.
The UK Disability Rights Commission (“DRC”) released its Web Access Report in April 2004, making references and recommendations based on the World Wide Web Consortium (“W3C”) and their Web Accessibility Initiative (“WAI”), which gives a complementary list of prioritised guidelines for producing accessible web content, as well as guidelines for software developers and the development of user agents such as browsers, media players, etc. It is important to note that the W3C was not involved in any of the research or in the development of findings from the DRC’s Report, and have published comments, noting flaws in the findings of the Report.
The W3C/WAI produced a set of three accessibility guidelines recognised as international standards. The WAI Guidelines – comprised of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, and the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 – address requirements for making websites, browsers, media players, assistive technologies, and Web authoring tools accessible for people with disabilities. These WAI Guidelines have been developed with the international cooperation of industry, disability organisations, accessibility researchers, and government representatives. The current WAI Guidelines are internationally accepted as an appropriate Accessibility framework, and these are the Guidelines that Very New Media work to with regard to web-based Accessible content.
Very New Media & Accessibility
Very New Media strives to make all of our online resources available to anyone who wishes to view them, regardless of disability. We strive to build, where possible, content-rich websites and applications that deprecate gracefully where required to allow ease of access for those using assistive technologies. As far as we have been able to achieve, our web-based, consumer-facing projects conform to Priority 1 of the WAI Guideline Checkpoints and Priorities 2 & 3 in part (see “Resources“).
Since October 2004, Very New Media have developed websites and online resources for our clients with Accessibility in mind, conforming where possible to at least Priority 1 of the WAI Guidelines Checklist.
Third Party Links
Linked websites are not under the control of Very New Media and Very New Media is not responsible for the Accessibility of any linked site or any link contained in a linked site, regardless of our representation and the context of the links on verynewmedia.com. Very New Media provides links to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply or constitute an endorsement by Very New Media of the site and its Accessibility features or lack thereof, nor express or project our Accessibility policy upon any links found on verynewmedia.com
