Accessibility Statement
There has been a lot of discussion over recent years about making the web accessible. Many of the debates are still raging and these days everyone should have an opinion on accessibility. This is ours.
We've got a lot to say on the subject and we're constantly improving the work we do. The industry recommends common guidelines and as you'd expect we're aware of them. We've created roles within our team dedicated to the advancement of our understanding of the issues and practicalities around accessibility.
So what's it all about? We believe in access for all, however you use the web and whatever device you use to access it. But we also believe in not compromising business needs and objectives in order to meet guidelines.
These four principles help us to live up to this goal:
- We will always strive to create the best possible user experience
- Our sites will provide consistent access to whatever content the user needs
- Where possible the site will degrade visually to accommodate a greater demographic
- It is about sites being more usable - focusing on people and how they really want to use business tools and services, not just following guidelines
As a digital agency we need to practice what we preach and we've used this site to give it a damn good shot. We could have created a beautiful looking site in Flash because that would have been the easiest way to do it, but that wouldn't have been what we'd have told a client to do, so why would we do it ourselves? We've predominately used HTML, with snippets of other technologies that should enhance the experience. We've also worked hard to make the site scale, adapt and work with the browser and screen of your choice.
If you have similar opinions, disagree with our sentiment or would like to talk to us further then drop us a line: ideas@fsnm.co.uk
Exceptions
IE6
Whilst we have endeavoured to make this site display consistently across the most prominent browser, it is not always possible to achieve desired results due to bugs in older browsers.
Producing a site utilising percentage widths lead to some aspects of our design triggering a bug in IE6’s visual formatting model, as detailed at http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/percentages.html. As a result of this we chose to optimise the IE6 view for 1024 width resolution. We hope that this allows a greater proportion of users to view the site without limiting our creativity in later browsers. If you experience difficulties viewing this site or have any suggestions the please get in contact with us.
Use of target attribute
We have opted for the XHTML 1.0 Transitional doc type to facilitate the use of the target attribute. As many of our pages link to external clients sites we thought it best that they open in a new window.