Portfolio

Usability and accessibility

We do our best to enable accessible and usable design and content. Usability and accessibility rely upon a few elements:

• a clear analysis of the visitor needs,
• a relevant content structure,
• the conformance to standards,
• the choice of the right development technology.

On every web page that we design, we use a "Doctype", which is a reference to the normative document, issued by the World Wide Web Consortium, governing the validity of the tags used in a Web page. And we are able to design pages for Triple-A conformance to WAI, the Web Accessibility Initiative (see below "conformance to standards")

These rules apply both for publicly accessible websites and for in-house applications.

We also pay attention to the privacy issues and may enable fully p3p compliant web sites.

Analysis of the visitors target and needs analysis

Who will be the visitors or users of the web site? This question must be answered at first. So, it will be possible to analyze their needs. Such a step will deliver the necessary guidelines for choosing the right technology.

Content structure

We use headings in relation with the content of each page, page titles, summaries and we manage the various tags as consistently as we can to convey the structure and the meaning of the content that we present; doing so, we enable, as needed, the implementation of assisting technology to figure out the right structure of the content offered by a website.

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Conformance to standards

We conform, as strictly as possible, to the "Doctype". We keep up to date with the evolution of the Web technology and the evolution of Web standards and recommendations, in particular for the HTML and XHTML languages, for CSS, the cascading stylesheets, and for WAI, the Web accessibility initiative.

HTML - XHTML

At this time we usually follow any of the following recommendations issued by the W3C: "HTML 4.01 Strict" or "4.01 transitional" or "XHTML 1.0 strict".

CSS - Stylesheets

We conform to the CSS2 recommendation for the use of cascading stylesheets to visually format our pages and we try to keep our design pleasant for people of all ages using various display and computer environments. We make all efforts to get a design that transforms smoothly from a graphic appearance to a full text document. In a few situations where we use large or complex images, we provide an explicit long description (via the "Longdesc" tag).

WAI - Web accessibility initiative

Apart from the usability of our design and content for an audience including people of all ages, we do our best to make visiting the websites that we design easier to use for people using screen readers, voice browsers or screen magnifiers, for color-blind users, for people requiring a high contrast and people requiring a low contrast.

We address all of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 from the W3C, the World Wide web Consortium, including all Priority 1, Priority 2 and Priority 3 checkpoints defined in the Guidelines.

So, as needed, we may design web sites that are able to claim a Triple-A or AAA compliance for each page with a Triple-A mention, that conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 from the W3C, the World Wide web Consortium. See the WAI initiative [second window]

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Development technology and testing

We mainly develop with server side scripting technology. Our two main motivations are: 1. The scripts executed by the server do not require specific resources from the visitor environment. 2.Such server side scripting enables to pass the Web document to the visitor browser as a correctly formatted page.

We only request the Javascript language to provide external linking in a second window, which is more comfortable for most users. As we use a "rel" attribute to do so and we give the necessary information along with the link, assisting technology may use the link in the main window, as needed.

We extensively test our pages for display in various user environment, including older browsers. As we said about our use of CSS, cascading stylesheets, we make all efforts to get a design that transforms smoothly from the latest technology to older ones including full text. We also extensively use validators, such as Tidy and the validators offered by the W3C, the World Wide Web consortium, as well as many other validation services more specific, such as Bobby or BrowserCam.

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