Digitalworx dot biz Accessible web development, Limassol, Cyprus

DigitalWorx is appointed once more to design the promotional materials for the 3rd International Martial Arts Event which will take place 2nd to 4th May 2007 at Arsinoe Beach Hotel, Limassol and is expected to draw a considerable number of martial arts enthusiasts from all over the world.

The 3-day Event is organized by the Martial Arts Academy and Chief Instructor Sensei Agis Agisilaou. The program consists of Karate-Do Championship as well as seminars in Aikido, Karate and Tai Chi followed by a Demonstration and Awards Ceremony.

Registration is required for participation in the Competition and Seminars. More information can be obtained from the the Martial Arts Academy.

DigitalWorx are pleased to announce their 2006 sponsorship of the 2nd Int'l Martial Arts Event organized by the Martial Arts Academy.

As a provider of Accessible Web & Graphic Design services, DigitalWorx decided this would be a good opportunity for a wider name recognition and a way to promote their business while getting involved in the community.

This year the event will comprise of Aikido, Karate-Do & Tai-Chi seminars to be taught by 4 martial arts experts followed by a demonstration and press conference. The event will take place on 3rd-4th June at Arsinoe Beach Hotel, Limassol.

More information is available at the Martial Arts Academy.

To reinforce their commitment to standards and accessibility, DigitalWorx goes through a total site reboot migrating from a table-based layout to a totally CSS-driven liquid design.

Although there are yet no legal requirements in Cyprus for Web accessibility, DigitalWorx continues its initiative to incorporate provisions of WAI - WCAG into their designs.

The new site was built to showcase that accessible design is within reach of those who are willing to make an effort in that direction. Features implemented include amongst others skip links, consistent navigation, accessible forms, easy to understand language, site-wide accesskeys for keyboard users, and a friendly print style sheet.

Sophia Kapterian, the Armenian/Greek developer behind DigitalWorx is currently the only Cyprus member at the Guild of Accessible Web Designers. Fluent in English, French, Greek, Armenian and Arabic, her next goal for 2006 is to provide visitors international flavours of DigitalWorx.

Limassol became the center of attraction this month when hundreds of martial arts enthusiasts assembled on the island to attend and partake at the 1st Int'l Martial Arts Seminars & Competitions in Aikido, To Te Jujitsu, Karate-Do and Tai-Chi, organized by the Martial Arts Academy - Sensei Agis Agisilaou in Limassol.

This is the first event of its kind in Cyprus to bring together five distinguished martial arts experts of different disciplines to demonstrate and instruct their skills under one roof.

As sponsors of this event DigitalWorx undertook the design work for the promotional campaign.

At DigitalWorx we embrace challenge. In late 2004 we approached the Arab Federation for Food Industries (AFFI), an international independent association promoting the food industry in the Arab world, to enumerate the benefits they would reap should they decide to upgrade their site to W3C and WCAG standards.

DigitalWorx enumerated a few of the cost savings they would enjoy from such a move on a day-to-day basis: bandwidth savings from smaller file sizes and faster-loading pages, page accessibility to small devices (PDAs, tablet PCs, etc), cross-browser compliance, expeditious future redesign and web maintenance, and the inclusive approach and the wider audience they would gain. Such savings are not negligible. The perceived business benefits were absorbed and before long the decision was taken to move forward with the upgrade.

 

“ Those who say it can't be done are being passed by those doing it. ”

 

Anonymous

AFFI Arabic Website Development objectives

• Development was to be made on a Windows 98 machine, something we were told was not possible. We wanted to prove otherwise.
• Obviously we had to work in a browser-reversed, right-to-left environment and had to make the necessary adjustments to both markup and CSS.
• All pages were to be hand-coded using a simple editor.
• All page layouts were to be liquid and CSS-based with clear separation of content from presentation, eschewing table-based layouts save where valid tabular data were present.
• Choice of standard was set to XHTML 1.0 Strict.
• We were to show that not many resources are needed to produce compliant pages. Only a single developer from DigitalWorx would be assigned to handle all the markup and presentation and another developer for any PHP forms.
• It was imperative for us at DigitalWorx to present everything in Arabic, including the numerals.
• A print style sheet would have to be put in place to accommodate all the lists and sublists to present the information in a coherent manner.

After about 50 hours of hand-coding, DigitalWorx successfully delivered the new AFFI site with over 100 pages of information and a number of photo galleries in accessible and valid format — a challenging but nevertheless rewarding project with all parties gaining from the experience.