The fact that you are reading this page probably means you already know that accessibility is important. With that in mind, we will not bore you with details of accessibility guidelines or lecture you on your legal and moral obligations to make your website accessible. What we will do is tell you about our passion for accessibility.

Our passion

At Flame, we like to think of ourselves as web accessibility evangelists. Like all good evangelists, we have a simple manifesto:

• Accessibility is about more than building for the disabled
• Doing something about accessibility is better than doing nothing at all
• WAI guidelines are the start of good accessibility, not the end

These underlying principles hold true even where current practice about how to ensure the best level of accessibility changes (which is constantly happening as new techniques are developed)

More than the disabled

Let us be clear about this. In our view web accessibility goes beyond just designing for people with physical or cognitive disabilities. Accessibility is about making your website available to the widest possible audience no matter what their browser, device, connection speed or disability.

The business perspective

Accessibility makes sense from a business perspective as well as a moral and legal one. Why turn away visitors to your website just because they are using a dial up connection, do not have the latest browser technology or have poor vision?

A pragmatic approach

We may be evangelists for good accessibility but we are also pragmatists. We understand that accessibility can be an overwhelming subject and that it can be hard to judge the return on investment. We encourage our clients to do what they can about accessibility, rather than being put off by the enormity of the issue and doing nothing at all. Even meeting the most basic levels of accessible design puts you ahead of the majority of websites online. We do not condemn people for not considering accessibility but rather encourage those who wish to do something.

It is about more than ticking boxes

We receive many invitations to tender that ask us to meet certain levels of accessibility as defined by the WAI guidelines. It is great to see clients being aware of accessibility and adding requirements into their briefs. We will gladly build to a particular standard and have a lot of experience doing so but we also believe that accessibility is about more than ticking boxes. We help our clients' analyse their target audience and ascertain which accessibility problems are likely to be the biggest obstacles for their users. Sometimes we find that WAI guidelines are not always the right solution for particular user groups and that an alternative approach might be more appropriate.