web site accessibility statement

Visitors with disabilities will benefit from reviewing our accessibility instructions for those users with disabilities.

Labrow Marketing supports accessibility on the Web. Every effort has been made to ensure that this Web site is as accessible as possible, based on recognised accessibility guidelines and standards. Please note that not all browsers or access devices fully support these standards.

All pages in this site are Bobby AAA Approved and conform to all priority 1 and most priority 2 and 3 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This Web site is tested regularly for compliance with current accessibility standards.

All pages on this site are tested as valid XHTML transitional, using W3C's mark-up validation service, and conform to W3C's recommendations and standards.

Standards-compliant, forward-compliant, not browser-compliant

For years, Web designers (including us) have used many HTML features which reduce accessibility - simply because they are the surest way to achieve backwards browser compliance. Examples of this include using tables for layout, JavaScript rollovers and deprecated tags (such as FONT, instead of using style sheets). This enables a Web site to be backwards-compatible with those browsers which don't fully or properly support Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standards - at the expense of both forwards compatibility and accessibility.

This site is forward-compliant, not browser-compliant. This means that it is written for today's mainstream browsers, using CSS, including those features designed for people with disabilities. Inevitably, therefore, this site does not always render properly in those earlier browsers which don't fully or properly support CSS standards. Since the standards compliance of browsers is improving, this issue is diminishing. Indeed, this site renders consistently and almost perfectly in most modern browsers, with a few minor bugs and exceptions (all of which, as far as we are aware) are due to non-compliance with CSS standards.

If you are using an outdated browser, I encourage you to upgrade it. In many cases there is no (or little) financial cost to do this. More importantly, since making Web sites equally accessible to those users with disabilities requires technologies which are supported only in more modern browsers, by upgrading, you will be helping to reduce the need for Web sites to be browser-compliant, as opposed to standards-compliant.

If you are in the process of commissioning a new Web site, I urge you to not specify to the developer that the site 'work in all old browsers', but to specify that the site support CSS and accessibility standards. This will provide you with a Web site which is more future proof, runs much faster, is compliant with accessibility legislation and is actually viewable on more devices, not fewer. If well designed, the content for the site will still be available, even to those older browsers, though the design may not be exactly as intended. All you will lose is 'some' compatibility with older browsers.