Café Rouge's new 'accessible' website

Café Rouge has recently relaunched their website with accessibility in mind and are "taking the challenge of web accessibility seriously", according to their press release today. I’m not so sure if I agree with this statement. They claim their website conforms to Level A of the accessibility guidelines, but really this is nothing to shout about. (This is particularly true as the site doesn’t even conform to level A. For example, the site can’t be used if images are turned off and equivalent content isn’t provided for users who don’t have Flash.)

Conformance to just Level A guidelines means that more or less everyone will be able to access the content, but really you’ve got to be aiming higher than this. Even though most people can access all the content, it will be so incredibly difficult and arduous to do so for many users with special needs that they might as well have not bothered. We’ve got to be aiming higher than Level A, particularly when building a brand new site that isn’t particularly sizeable. Full compliance with level AA or even AAA isn’t realistic for many organisations in practice, but we at least need to be aiming for these as every little bit helps.

Probably the most ironic thing about the Café Rouge press release is that the homepage of their new site sports a link, 'click here'. Avoiding link text like 'click here' and making sure link text makes sense out of context is one of the most well known and important guidelines out there.

Trenton Moss, Webcredible