Accessibility

We’re absolutely passionate about creating the most accessible
experience for every one of our site visitors, and never want to be
complacent about our offering, so if you have any questions about
accessibility, feedback or suggestions, we’d love to hear your
thoughts by email to gez(at)stardotstar(dot)com

In designing our own site – and in all the work we do – we’ve taken
care to consider the physical, sensory and cognitive dimensions of
accessibility, and our decisions are described below. Best practice in
this area is extremely fast moving however, and there are many trade-
offs, so no solution will ever be perfect.

We have taken the following specific steps to make our site accessible:

1) Mechanical Validation

Our site validates mechanically for accessibility using both Cynthia
and WAVE. These tools have many limitations, and by no means cover the
whole picture, but it’s a solid base.

2) Best practice in standards-compliance

Every page of our site validates as well-formed markup, and we have
taken care to ensure a proper semantic structure and source-order, and
to separate content cleanly from presentation. The site is usable with
CSS disabled.

The realities of cross-platform web development at this historical
moment mean that in addition to the fully standards-compliant CSS that
styles the core site, we have also taken advantage of the enhanced
visual opportunities available in small, cleanly-documented set of
proprietary attributes, specifically rounded corners, text and box
shadows and gradients. In every case these are solely a visual
enhancement, and do not affect the wider experience of content on the
site.

Where we offer an enriched experience using Javascript – for example
for images slideshows and galleries, we have used progressive
enhancement techniques to ensure that the full content remains
accessible even with javascript disabled.

3) Best practice in navigation design

In keeping with best practice, our site navigation is consistent,
consistently-positioned, semantically marked-up and screen-reader
friendly. We’ve also provided a ‘skip nav’ link. Hot keys are not
implemented – we usually provide this feature for our web
applications, but in this case it was felt that the additional
cognitive overhead offset the direct benefits.

4) Best practice in image replacement

A design portfolio poses a quandry for accessible design. Because the
gallery pages of our site are substantially image heavy, as a showcase
of our design, we felt that providing full long descriptions provided
a poor screen reader experience, so they have been removed. We have
taken care however to provide full supporting text documentation of
each project as a complement to the visual galleries, and hope that
these sections remain informative and interesting even in text mode.

All key image content is fully alt-tagged, and no text is hard-coded
into graphics without a screen reader-friendly alternative.

5) Site structure and mapping

We do not at present provide a sitemap. We’re working on it and hope
to provide one soon.

6) Clarity

In the design, organisation and copywriting of our site, we’ve made
every effort to use clear, straightforward language, and have avoided
both jargon and the overly-technical. There’s always room to improve,
but we are working hard on providing the simplest, clearest content.