Cookie compliance made easy
The new EU cookie law has caused a lot of confusion, particularly around the subject of what website owners need to do to be compliant. That wasn’t helped by the fact that the ICO changed their advice literally hours before the new regulations came into practical effect.
To ease the pain a little bit, we’ve released a small library of code, called cookiealert.js which aims to make compliance nice and easy. Using a technique which allows visitors to a website to give “implicit consent”, it’s quick and easy to deploy, with a minimal amount of technical jiggery-pokery. It’s also designed to be nice and elegant on the front-end, so that it isn’t too obtrusive — we found that so many of the solutions already out there were cumbersome, intricate or just plain ugly.
We also found that none of the solutions we came across provided a properly accessible solution — so many relied solely on Javascript, meaning many visitors to websites who use assistive devices would have a less-than-ideal experience, or wouldn’t even be able to give their consent at all.
Although our solution isn’t 100% perfect (but we’re working on that), it aspires to go beyond the other solutions out there, with graceful fallbacks for users who don’t have Javascript enabled. We’ve also designed it so that it’s easy to customise the look-and-feel to fit in with any website. And our other aim was to make it really small, with no dependencies on any other code. It is, in fact, tiny — at just 1.8kb.
We’ve also thrown in some sample copy for your privacy pages, to explain to your website visitors all about your use of cookies, in simple terms.
You can check out the project page at where you can download the latest package. And because it’s released under an open source MIT license, you’re free to make changes, adapt it and redistribute it as you please.
And if you’re not technically-savvy, and need some help with ensuring your website is compliant with the new EU regulations, we can help you with advice and technical expertise — just get in touch at shout@wemakemedia.co.uk
Posted on June 12th, 2012