Folio: CMS Cameron McKenna

Type:

Website Accessibility Audit

Date:

March 2007

Employer:

Nixon McInnes

Skills:

Accessibility analysis and recommendations

CMS Cameron McKenna, a large London law firm, commissioned Nixon McInnes to perform an accessibility audit of their website. They were keen to ensure that their site complied with accessibility guidelines.

As one of the accessibility experts at Nixon McInnes, I undertook a detailed audit of key site templates. The audit was performed against the WCAG 1.0 guidelines. I did not use the new draft WCAG 2.0 guidelines as I feel that in real terms they provide a less robust framework to test against.

The audit checked whether or not the site met all accessibility priorites: 1,2 and 3. I wrote an extensive report detailing all the areas that met the guidelines and all the areas that failed. The final part of the exercise was to compile a list of recommendations on how to improve the site: this included recommendations that the site swicth to a pure XHTML/CSS layout and that some proprietary navigation be redeveloped so that it would work if JavaScript was unavailable.

As of August 2008, most of the recommendations remain unimplemented on the site.