I am proud to announce that I am now a member of The Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS):

"The Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS) is a worldwide association of professional organisations, web designers and developers working together to promote the use and preservation of accessible design standards.

Promoting a vision of the future that assumes accessible web design to be, relevant, obtainable, and not at odds with successful business practice or good visual and usable design."

A thank you ...

I've just had another check through your site and I have to say I'm totally impressed! What a difference!

It's clean, accessible and it looks pretty much exactly the same as before!

I would like to offer my thanks to Blair Millen for all his help and advice that has helped me gain my membership.

To be honest, even if I hadn't been accepted, the pointers he gave me have gone a long way into making me a better and a more 'accessibility' minded developer, and I'm grateful for this and will
continue to try and improve with every project. That would have been good enough for me, regardless of acceptance or not.

But, I was accepted. And that's just great :)

What I had to do

I used this very site as my example, and there was a lot already in place when I applied for membership, but I had a few key issues that needed addressing. They were:

• Styles on :focus needed sorting, so that users can tab through content and know where they are
• The same applies with adding tab-index to elements, so that tabbing through content occurs in an appropriate order
• Ensuring elements have background-color applied for when images are disabled
• Ensuring that key layout images have a clear text alternative for when images are disabled

I sorted all these, left no stone un-turned, and I'm now a member :)

As mentioned, what I have learnt by going through this process I will be applying to future projects to ensure my standards are kept high.