Accessibility Considerations

We have recently redesigned the Made in Cumbria website to make it more accessible according to existing standards and legislation, but also to make the site quicker to load and easier to update.

Changes include moving all design elements (colours, fonts, borders etc.) to a separate Cascading Style Sheet (CSS information), converting the source code to XHTML (XHTML information), reducing the number of tables for layout purposes, and wherever possible, using proper tags for headings, paragraphs, lists, tabular data, forms, quotes etc.

Road sign, Ulpha Fell, Cumbria

This separation of content and presentation and the use of proper, structured markup, are good ways of improving accessibility in a variety of browsers and it will also aid web crawlers such as the Google bots when indexing the content of a site. Following web standards is also a way of keeping up with the rapid developments in browsing technology, making it more likely that the web pages will display correctly in the latest browsers or in a new device.

Apart from now (mostly, we have to add, since there are always a few dusty corners needing attention) complying with the Web Accessibility Initiative's (WAI) strictest standards, we have also seen great improvements in download speed due to the leaner, simpler source code, and not least in design precision and flexibility.

You can give us your opinion on the accessibility, usability and content of the Made in Cumbria site, and thereby provide us with valuable feedback so we can continue to improve the Made in Cumbria site.

If you would like to validate the XHTML source code of this or any other Made in Cumbria web page, or of our main CSS rules, you can do so by following the links provided below to the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Markup Validation Service (XHTML) and to the W3C CSS Validation Service (CSS) respectively. You can also use the W3C tools to validate the code of other sites.