We’re committed to easy and equivalent access for everyone
We are committed to making this website as accessible as possible to people with special needs, including those with visual, hearing, cognitive and motor impairments. We’re constantly working towards improving the accessibility of our websites to ensure we provide equal access and an equivalent experience to all of our sites’ users. Additionally, our goal is to promote independence, empowerment, and equivalence. We believe these practices embody empathy, on screen.
As part of our commitment to accessibility, we ensure that our website is compatible with:
- Recent versions of popular screen readers
- Operating system screen magnifiers
- Speech recognition software
- Operating system speech packages
We guarantee that our website follows accessibility best practices by following the principles of universal design. This ensures the site is flexible and adaptable to different users’ needs or preferences and is accessible through a variety of different technologies, including mobile devices or assistive technologies.
During the development phase we endeavor to follow WebAIM’s Principles of Accessible Design, which improves the accessibility of our website for users with disabilities by:
- Retaining the ability to adjust the font size
- Maintaining color/contrast ratios for text
- Providing keyboard accessible navigation
- Providing skip to content links at the top of the page
- Exposing information to the accessibility API through the use of ARIA attributes, when necessary
We also monitor the accessibility of website projects through the open-source tool Pa11y.
The Major Categories of Disability Types
- Visual – Blindness, low vision, color-blindness
- Hearing – Deafness and hard-of-hearing
- Motor – Inability to use a mouse, slow response time, limited fine motor control
- Cognitive – Learning disabilities, distractibility, inability to remember or focus on large amounts of information
Each of the major categories of disabilities requires certain types of adaptations in the design of web content. Most of the time, these adaptations benefit nearly everyone, not just people with disabilities. Almost everyone benefits from helpful illustrations, properly-organized content, and clear navigation. Similarly, while captions are a necessity for deaf users, they can be helpful to others, including anyone who views a video without audio.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1
Wherever possible, the sites we build will adhere to level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1). These guidelines were released in June 2018 and outline four main principles that state that sites should be:
- Perceivable – Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive
- Operable – User interface components and navigation must be operable
- Understandable – Information and the operation of user interface must be understandable
- Robust – Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies
Exceptions
Sometimes, despite best efforts, there are areas of the website that fall outside of intended web accessibility targets. Whilst we strive to adhere to the accepted guidelines and standards for accessibility and usability, it is not always possible to do so in all areas of each website.
Known exceptions are as follows:
- Google Map of locations within the Where to Buy page.
Contact
We are continually seeking out solutions that will bring all areas of the site up to the same level of overall web accessibility. In the meantime should you experience any difficulty in accessing this or any of our clients’ sites, please don’t hesitate to send an email to info@syncopationwine.com.