- The website pages and page templates should be designed to meet all Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, W3C World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation 11 December 2008, Level A & Level AA Success Criteria. (http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC- WCAG20-20081211/).
- Where a Tenderer considers any Success Criterion to be inappropriate or unachievable for some component of the content or templates, this must be stated explicitly in the tender, together with an explanatory rationale. Prior to tendering, Tenderers should be satisfied that they can meet these guidelines. Prior to project completion Tenderers will be required to provide an accurate Conformance Claim with WCAG 2.0.
- The Tenderer must, as far as possible, meet all appropriate and achievable checkpoints from all priority levels (1, 2 and 3) of the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 1.0 from the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Tenderer should note that the Department may arrange for an independent accessibility assessment for the new websites.
- It is essential that the proposed websites fulfill the following criteria:
- Be capable of producing valid HTML and CSS code;
- For all images, oblige authors to either include a text alternative or indicate that the image has no information content and add all attributes accordingly;
- Enable authors to identify heading levels and lists and apply markup accordingly;
- Enable author to identify the semantic structure of data tables and apply markup accordingly.