Web Accessibility Certification

Our web accessibility certification and trustmark which we have brought to you in partnership with Segala can help you to demonstrate compliance with the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Guidelines, Section 508 and other national specific legislation.

The programme contains 3 elements of trust, providing the most cost effective, flexible and highest degree of trust for accessibility compliance certification.

It’s now possible to certify sections of a Web site, instead of having to wait until the entire site is compliant.
This means you don’t have to deliver an accessible Web site in one hit.

It’s possible to build standards into your business process over time. This is possible as a direct result of the Content Labels technology.

Why do I need web accessibility certification

Web Accessibility Certification helps you to show that you care about your visitors web accessibility needs. Getting this certification, demonstrates that your website achieves the required level of web accessibility standards.

It also conveys a message and sign that the website has been designed to meet the desired levels of web accessibility guidelines and standards.

A major benefit is that it is a machine readable trustmark for accessibility, enabling search engines and browsers to detect the trustmark in the search engine results.

A trustmark plug-in is available for the users of Firefox to ascertain the status of the website in the search results.
It is very beneficial for organisations that have a corporate social responsibility policy in place and want to demonstrate their commitment towards their disabled online users.

You need to remember that this is an optional requirement but it can grow your online brand value and increase trust between your website visitors.

What will I get in the certification

Segala-Certified™ Trustmark

The Trustmark is a logo which is placed on certified Web pages. This is how we can enable you to demonstrate that a particular section of your Web site complies with Web accessibility standards & legislation.

Content Label

A Content Label is a file that contains Metadata, enabling search engines to make Segala-certified Web sites more prominent in search results.

Why Content Labels are useful

Visual Trustmarks provided by organisations such as VeriSign, GeoTrust and TRUSTe have limitied benefit.

This is because you must first visit a Web site to see if it complies with an industry standard or code of conduct by displaying a Trustmark.

Content Labels on the other hand can be detected by search engines and browsers which means users can find out which sites have Trustmarks without having to visit them.

Certificate

The Certificate is a Web page which can be viewed when a user clicks on the Trustmark. This allows them to see what claims are being made about a specific page or site.

The Certificate includes information such as
• Web site owner
• Assertion about guidelines
• Domain name
• Unique certificate number
• Expiry date

Controlling misuse

There is an option on each Certificate to allow end users to report a misuse of the Trustmark directly to Segala, or us as appropriate.

Benefits
• The reporting mechanism provides feedback to help you maintain your Web sites to the highest possible standards
• It can be used to remind you that a change to content may have inadvertently had an impact on the original claims
• It prohibits the use of the Trustmark on a site that is making fraudulent claims about accessibility.

We will only revoke a certificate if you are unable to address non-compliance issues and if there is no alternative course of action.

Segala will seek to work with you to make adjustments that are needed to ensure the certificate remains valid.

What can you do next

So the question is, what can you do to stay ahead of the competition or you want to maintain the status quo. Opportunities can only be had by people who can embrace the change and are prepared to move ahead.

The technology is already there to make all of this possible and now the government is getting behind it as it is necessary to decrease the digital divide. You can have web 2.0 accessible websites which load blazingly fast, are smart in their own right and liked by search engines like anything.

You can ignore the above facts and but your competition is definitely going to be smart and move ahead to the future-proof next generation websites.

If you want to give your company a competitive edge, get in touch with us for a no-obligation half an-hour free consultation and we will take care of everything else.