Website Accessibility

As web professionals with considerable experience of web standards, accessibility and usability, we care deeply that every website we produce is built responsibly and can be used by everyone. We have made every effort to ensure that our own website meets our own criteria, current best-practice, and relevant legislation. Below we detail some of the most important considerations.

If you do have any feedback, questions, corrections, perhaps want to congratulate us or maybe have a good moan, then please contact us via hello@blend.uk.com.

Standards compliance

All pages on this site aim to validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. The validation program can determine with 100% accuracy whether a page is valid XHTML. There are still elements we may purposely use that will make certain pages fail. Blend use common sense wherever possible.

All pages on this site also aim to be Section 508 approved, complying with the U.S. Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines.

Browsers

Blend believe that 100% of all website information should be accessible regardless of the browser used. We have built this website using current web standards to meet this criteria. We, like many others, support standards-compliant browsers as a priority, but make use of progressive enhancement to ensure delivery of information to all browsers.

Blend believe in driving web design forwards through responsible implementation and innovation. We strongly support web standards and forward-thinking web design and layout, and we actively make use of new methodologies and latest specifications.

This website makes use of layout and visual techniques made available with the CSS3 specification, and these methods are supported within Safari, Firefox v2 upwards, Opera v9 upwards, Camino (Mac) and Internet Explorer v8 beta. Users browsing with IE7 or below, Firefox 1.x, and older browsers will still be able to access all information, though the visual experience may be reduced where necessary, following progressive enhancement best-practice.

We would encourage Internet Explorer users to upgrade their copy of IE 5.5 or 6, or abandon this terrible browser altogether and use Firefox or Safari (both available for Windows).

Hand-held devices

We are working on a mobile version of Blend website and hope to launch in early 2010. The mobile version of the website will improve user browsing experience on devices with small screens and limited web access.

As a result of developing using web standards based guidelines, the main website will still function on mobile devices.

We are also developing an iPhone version of the website. We already have the Content management system optimised for the iPhone.

Links

All links to external websites or resources open in the same window for accessibility reasons.

Images

• All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.
• All background and decorative images are created with stylesheets, and do not require ALT attributes.
• Our web pages are designed so that the content is still legible and accessible with images turned off, or stylesheets unavailable.

Content and structure

• This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout, and elements of unobtrusive JavaScript for behaviour.
• If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, or if stylesheets are disabled, the content of each page is still readable.
• If JavaScript is unavailable or disabled, any bahavioural functions will degrade and all content will remain accessible.
• Most of the text on this website can be increased or decreased in size using built-in browser tools. However, to maintain appearance we recommend using a modern browser with text-zoom facilities.