• Reach a broader audience
• Be compliant in a large majority of Web browsers
• Be fully accessibile to our users

The Commerce design adheres to and uses the following standards, guidelines and requirements:

• ISB Computing and Telecommunications Architecture Policy
• DIS Web Presentation Guidelines 5.1 for Digital Government
• State Standard for Internet Markup Language

Style sheets
Commerce’s website uses style sheets to implement a site-wide look and feel consistency. The presentation is defined using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets.) Keeping the presentation in separate documents and applying it to a set of HTML documents reduces the size of the document, which in turn provides our users with faster load times.

Accessibility
Washington State is committed to providing employees and the public, including individuals with disabilities, access to its Web-based information and services. Coding with standards (particularly CSS for positioning, and strict HTML) makes accessibility an easier goal to achieve, as standards have been created with accessibility in mind.

The Department of Social and Health Services offers the Washington Video Relay Service to assist residents who are deaf or hearing impaired to communicate via the Internet.

Suggested Browsers
Commerce’s website is designed to be readable in Firefox and Internet Explorer 6.0 and above. However, using the most recent versions of other browsers, will maximize your commerce.wa.gov user experience.

Learn more about upgrading your browser:

• Internet Explorer
• Mozilla / Firefox
• Safari
• Opera

If you have difficulty viewing Commerce’s website in a particular browser, please contact the webmaster.

Viewing Documents
Some documents within this web site require the use of Adobe PDF and various other Microsoft applications. 

If you don't already have Acrobat Reader installed on your system, a free download is available on the Adobe web site.

Microsoft offers free, downloadable viewers for:

• PowerPoint
• Word
• Excel