alansparkes.net open source web solutions

Since 1999 it has been law for websites to be made accessible. As part of the Disability and Discrimination Act revisions in 2004, small businesses are now exempt. No test case has been made in British law yet but the 2000 Olympic website case has led to UK firms changing their websites anonymously on the basis of accessibility audits. 

What happens if my site does not comply?

The worst case scenario for you and your business is that a disabled person can make a claim against you if your website makes it impossible or unreasonably difficult to access information and services. If you have not made reasonable adjustments and cannot show that this failure is justified, then you may be liable under the Disability Discrimination Act, and may have to pay compensation and be ordered by a court to change your site.

What's involved in getting my site accessible?

The answer is different for each site. It may require a minor adjustment and additional features to your web template - it all depends how the site was built in the first place. Quite often it involves the removal of table based designs and moving to a pure stylesheet design and layout. These types of sites are much faster to load. The navigation may need to be changed to make the site easier to navigate for screen reading technology. The size of the text should be controllable by the user, either through tools on the site or by allowing font sizes in the design which can be made larger through a users browser.

An example of an accessible makeover based on the Open Source Joomla! content management system can be found here: ARI Project

Making this site accessible to AA standards eventually involved a redesign of the whole website. Any web design process should build accessibility in from the start so if you are thinking of getting a new template or redesign of your site - make sure you decide upon an accessibility conformance level. You can read more about conformance levels here: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

If you would like a free accessibility report please contact me.

I am pleased to announce  that  free spam and virus protection are now available on all accounts.  You can choose to tag your email to filter and review it or you can choose to use our intelligent white list system. Please note this service is free to existing cusomers and you will need to request activation.

• Heuristics Spam Detection Engine - Our spam detection system uses some of the most advanced rules to determine if an e-mail message is spam
• Checksum Databases – Calculating check sums of mail you receive allows us to compare it with multiple databases of confirmed spam messages.This is one of the best ways of recognising a spam message as most will have already been report as spam so our system will know its spam
• Virus Scanner - Mail is also virus scanned to check it doesn’t contain viruses and is deleted if a virus is detected. Our system is always right up to date with all the latest virus definitions, updating many times throughout the day. It can also scan for viruses hidden in zip and other compressed files so can be relied upon to protect you
• Intelligent white listing system

Intelligent white listing system – This is very special part of our system that we developed to stop any genuine mail which under very rare circumstances might be blocked. If this did happen and you have selected to have the mail bounced back, the sender will be given the option to add them selves to your white list - an approved list of emails that you will not block. An e-mail is sent to the sender telling them that this has happened and offering them the chance to be added to our white list so they can resend the message.

They follow a link in the bounced message which takes them to our white listing system where they can enter their details.
An e-mail will then be sent to them with a link they must click on which shows that they are sending from address they have access. This is what prevents spammers from using the system as they rarely use a genuine e-mail addresses so would not be able to complete the white list signup.