Website Accessibility
For a website to be accessible, its content must be available to everyone, including people with disabilities. Accessible websites ensure:
- Smooth transformation: information and services should be accessible despite physical, sensory or cognitive user disabilities, work constraints or technological barriers.
- Understandable and navigable content: content should be presented in a clear and simple manner, and should provide understandable mechanisms to navigate within and between pages.
An accessible website: can be perceived, navigated, utilized (with a keyboard or devices other than a mouse) & be easily understood (even in attention-poor situations).
Why is Accessibility Important?
Why should you pay attention to website accessibility? There are a number of very good reasons for doing so.
It Makes Good Business Sense
Giving people a choice is good for business. Bad access is bad for business.
At least 10% of the population in most countries have disabilities. According to the Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities, individuals with disabilities have a combined income of nearly £400 billion. Of that figure, £100 billion is discretionary income. Can any company afford to exclude this market by making their internet services and web sites inaccessible?
Web site accessibility is about making information on your web site open to as wide an audience as possible: visitors with disabilities in particular.
It's the Law
Web sites offering a service must comply with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. The deadline for web site accessibility came into force in October 1999 when Part III - Access to Goods and Services of the Act became part of UK law. Web sites are now required by UK, European and US law (Section 508), to make their web site accessible to the disabled.
There have already been several actions over accessibility:
- Staples, the world's largest office products company, announced that it will be designing its website to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines issued by the World Wide Web consortium. This announcement is the result of the 34th Agreement reached without litigation using the Structured Negotiations process.
- Bruce Maguire vs. Sydney Olympics Organising Committee netted the litigant A$20,000 in damages. The legal costs and subsequent web development bill ran into millions.
- Ramada.com and Priceline.com have undertaken to pay $77,500 to improve their web sites' accessibility to settle an investigation by New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer.
- The class action case against Target.com, has set a legal precedent establishing that retailers must make their websites accessible to the blind under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This ruling puts Target and other companies on notice that the blind cannot be treated like second class citizens on the Internet. Under the settlement Target must ensure it's websites continuing accessibility to blind visitors. Additionally, the settlement included Target to setup a six million dollar ($6,000,000) fund to be used to pay valid claims. Target may also be required to pay fees and costs in an amount up to $4,636,000 for work on this case.
- A qualifications body was ruled to have discriminated against a blind systems manager when it failed to make its computer-based exam accessible to her. The tribunal ruling is the first to find a US company with no presence in the UK liable under the UK's Disability Discrimination Act.
- The Royal National Institute of the Blind ( RNIB ) has approached two large companies with regard to their websites. When they raised the accessibility issues of the websites under the DDA, both companies made the necessary changes, rather than facing the prospect of legal action.
- The Disability Rights Commission ( DRC ) launched a formal investigation into 1000 websites, of which over 80% posed barriers to disabled people. They issued a stern warning that organisations will face legal action under the DDA and the threat of unlimited compensation payments if they fail to make websites accessible for people with disabilities.
The large majority of web sites (around 80%) still do not meet
accessibility standards. Can you afford for your web site to be one of them?
