"I really thank you for your faithful attending to accessibility. It is so wonderful. If people only realized how important it is, maybe more would take it seriously. Hurray for you!"
—D. Thompson
Executive Director
Arizona Office for Americans with Disabilities

Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict.

Valid CSS 2.0.

Section 508 and WAI WCAG AAA compliant.

What is Standards-Based Web Design?

The standards-based movement is a cooperative effort of web developers all over the world to adhere to the standards published by the proper authority for same, the W3C or World Wide Web Consortium. This not-for-profit organization is responsible for creating a common method to present and deliver information on the web.

The standards-based movement also seeks to pressure proprietary software manufacturers into supporting common standards instead of making up their own rules and trying to get the rest of us to follow them.

The standards-based movement also seeks to make information accessible to as great a number of people as possible, regardless of physical disability, cognitive or other perceptual challenges, language and cultural differences or any other barrier to gaining information as effectively and quickly as possible.

The standards-based movement increasingly broadens it's definition of accessibility as new generations of XML-compliant devices such as hand-helds, web-enabled cell-phones and PDAs enable people to demand information in more times and places.

What is developed by applying standards?

Current standards, for both the W3C and cutting-edge web developers internationally, can be summarized as "semantically organized information structured in CSS-XHTML markup". You might think of it as both a means of creating the desired visual design and a method of organizing and presenting information in a way that most people find easiest to deal with.

Advantages of standards-based web development.

The advantages are so numerous as to become diffuse. To put it in a nutshell, non-standards-based websites are 10 year old code. By and large, they are so full of quirks and fixes for finicky old browsers that they will start to break in today's next-generation web browsers such as Firefox and Netscape 8.0. But let's focus on some specifics.

Standards-based websites:

Function on more web browsers including hand-held or PDA devices.
Download faster than other types of websites.
Are more easily searched for information by humans and search engines.
Are cheaper and easier to maintain and modify.
Are accessible to persons with a broad range of common disability.
Offer the best future-compatibility with technologies of tomorrow. This means your investment has a greater life span.

Standards-based websites also call for the highest level of expertise in website design and development.

It all has to be hand code and every site design is a unique work of code-art. They are tested and proved across multiple web browsers on multiple operating systems, they are validated by automated verification tools, they are use-tested with real people. There's no way to achieve a standards-compliant product with DreamWeaver, GoLive, FrontPage or any similar tools. For this reason, standards-based web development tends to be more expensive up-front, but the savings and advantages down the line more than compensate.

dataSpheric website accessibilty services include: