Web Site Accessibility

The Legal Position

Web site owners have a legal responsibility with regards to the accessibility of their websites under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (UK). Similar legislation exists in other countries e.g. Section 508 in the US.

The Act makes it unlawful for companies to provide an inferior service to, or discriminate against, a disabled person. Although no one has yet taken a claim against a web site owner in the UK to court, you need to take reasonable steps to ensure that your web site can be used by people with visual impairments or physical disabilities.

What's involved

Different people access the Web in different ways. There are many different hardware and software technologies involved. For instance, though most people use PCs or Macs, an increasing number use PDAs, Web TV and mobile phones. A visually-impaired user may set his browser to display larger text, or he may use a screen reader (also known as a voice browser) to speak the text aloud. A web site must cater for these different users.

The web designer must take into account a variety of disabilities, for example, visual impairment, colour blindness, dyslexia, cognitive difficulties.

Designing for accessibility means, in general, ensuring that pages are coded with well thought-out, standards-compliant code which follows the recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (see below).

Benefits

A web site which takes account of accessibility issues appeals to the widest possible target audience, by ensuring that visitors with disabilities are not excluded.

An accessible web site benefits all users. This is because following the accessibility guidelines generally results in a web site that is more usable by all visitors.

Also, such a web site is more accessible to search engines, resulting in improved search engine ranking.

Techniques, Checklists and Conformance

The World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C WAI) publish guidelines, known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and checklists to help web developers create accessible web sites.

The WAI groups the checklist criteria into a hierarchy of three priority levels: Priority 1 checkpoints represent a minimal standard for a web site, and Priority 3 checkpoints represent the optimum standard.

By verifying the level of conformance of a web page, the designer can display one of three logos: single-A (if the site meets all the Priority 1 criteria), double-A (for Priority 2 criteria) or treble-A (for Priority 3 criteria).

There are various tools to assist in verifying conformance with the guidelines. The most popular of these is Bobby. This produces a report on each submitted web page, detailing what needs to be done to make the page accessible.