Synchrotech's efforts to achieve WAI and W3C Standards compliance
Synchrotech values all its customers. In that spirit we take W3C Standards, WAI, Section 508, and Section 255 very seriously. The following is an introduction to our efforts to insure our web presence follows WAI guidelines a closely as possible.
Before starting it might be good to read the W3C Introduction to Web Accessibility.
Considerations
When we redesigned our site in August 2006 our goals weren't only to produce an attractive, informative, and easy to use site for our customers. We determined from the start that following W3C standards and striving to follow Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines would be an integral part of our redesign efforts, not an after thought. This wouldn't be an easy task considering Synchrotech's site comprises hundreds of pages and features online shopping for hundreds of products. Only through careful planning and execution would we achieve the fore-mentioned goals. The following is a chronicle of our efforts.
Document Type
Our first task was to insure that our entire site complied with HTML standards as set forth by the W3C. This led to several design considerations and decisions, the first of which was which document type (DTD) would we adhere to.
Deciding between the latest HTML and XHTML standards was our first hurtle. We seriously considered XHTML, but because at the time the issues with MSIE 6.x and earlier with XHTML hadn't fully been resolved in a way that work elegantly for us, we decided on HTML. This decision was based partly on the fact that our logs show a large percentage of our visitors use the non-standards-compliant client. While some would argue that we should merely have used content negotiation or another technique to work around this, we decided to avoid an overly complex solution.
Instead we went with HTML 4.01
