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MARCOR's New Website Reaches Widest Possible Audiences
Optimizes Accessibility for Both Impaired Users and Search Engines
4/20/2007–Hunt Valley, MD–Designing a Web site that is as accessible by people with disabilities as by those without was the aim of MARCOR Remediation’s Web developer, Christian Ready. And to MARCOR, a nationwide environmental contracting company, the decision to redesign its site following Web standards for accessibility just made good business sense.
“Considering that a Stanford University study showed that about 10% of Web users have some impairment, whether it is blindness, mobility or cognitive problems, or even failing eyesight, the changes we’ve made to our new Web site have made it accessible to all,” Ready said. MARCOR’s newly formatted site now conforms with information technology standards set forth by the non-profit organization, the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), which is a recognized group of Web designers and thought leaders who define Web standards. These guidelines are also followed for government Web sites per Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The ADA mandate does not yet require the private sector to follow its dictates, but a trend has emerged among influential Web designers to implement it across the board, according to Ready. (A draft revision of Section 508 is due out this summer.)
In addition, the newly constructed site, launched on April 16 at www.marcor.com, is constructed and coded to be more easily found by search engines and to be easier to navigate than the previous version.
Many of the changes to the MARCOR Web site may not be immediately evident just by looking at it, although some are. One of the easier-to-spot changes is a homepage text re-sizing option at the top of the page that enlarges the text and photos as desired. “While most Web browsers offer the text re-sizing option in their menus, it takes a more knowledgeable computer user to find the option,” Ready explained. “Our site’s re-sizing option is hard to miss.”
In addition, the site incorporates a cleaner look, using generous amounts of white space that give the eyes a place to rest. “This makes it simpler for people to skim our pages to immediately gather the information that they want,” he said.
For visually impaired users who employ a screen reader, which reads and identifies through the spoken word what is displayed on a Web page, the change to the MARCOR site will be more dramatic. By coding the pages to be semantically correct using proper hypertext markup language (HTML) – the predominant language for the creation of Web pages that denotes headings, paragraphs, etc. – MARCOR tells the visitor what is on the page, not what the page looks like. “Without using this approach, the screen reader might say ‘Home page…table with five rows, three columns,’” Ready said. “In our new Web site, the screen reader may say ‘There are five links on this page. The first is for Asbestos and Lead Abatement; the second is for Disaster Recovery; the third is for Emergency Spill Response, etc.’ The idea is to enable the visitor to ‘listen at a glance’ and to facilitate their visit to our site,” Ready noted.
According to Ready, there have been two big shifts in the Web site design industry. “When the Web first got started, it was inherently a very accessible place because sites were simple documents that screen readers could decipher. Then in the 1990s, companies, influenced by the glitz of print and television media, wanted their Web sites to have greater visual appeal. Web designers had to do convoluted tricks with code to render appealing designs.
“Fortunately, in the last few years, there has been a kind of renaissance: browser vendors have begun to conform to standards for programming languages used to construct the Web. Once they choose to follow and implement those standards properly, the Web becomes a more accessible place,” Ready explained. “MARCOR is in the forefront of accessible Web design among private industry and is proud that it has made its site a more welcoming place.”
Comments about MARCOR’s Web redesign are appreciated and welcome.
MARCOR Remediation, a specialty contracting company founded in 1980 with a current staff of 700 and headquarters in Hunt Valley, MD, performs a full range of environmental contracting services. These include industrial cleaning, asbestos and lead hazard abatement, mold remediation, plant/process decommissioning and demolition, soil and groundwater remediation, emergency spill response, gun range remediation, storage tank management, and restorative cleaning projects. Customers typically include industrial hygienists, commercial and industrial clients, government agencies, environmental consultants, real estate development and property management firms, Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT), the hospitality industry, educational institutions, health care facilities, and others. Each of the company’s 15 offices is staffed with the necessary mix of senior technical management, regulatory compliance experts, and experienced HAZMAT labor force. For more information, the Web site is www.marcor.com.
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