Accessibility
What Is It:
Accessibility allows users with disabilities or visual impairments to access and use your site easily. Under section 3 of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, which refers to the provision of goods, facilities and services, service providers must make 'reasonable adjustments' for disabled
people and not discriminate against them. The Code of Practice
published by the Disability Rights Commission, which specifically
mentions websites, contains the following information:
- 2.2 (p7): “The Disability Discrimination Act makes it
unlawful for a service provider to discriminate against a disabled
person by refusing to provide any service which it provides to members
of the public.”
- 4.7 (p39): “From 1st October 1999 a service
provider has to take reasonable steps to change a practice which makes
it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to make use of its
services.”
- 2.13 - 2.17 (p11-13): “What services are affected
by the Disability Discrimination Act? An airline company provides a
flight reservation and booking service to the public on its website.
This is a provision of a service and is subject to the act.”
- 5.23
(p71): “For people with visual impairments, the range of auxiliary aids
or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that
services are accessible might include... accessible websites.”
- 5.26
(p68): “For people with hearing disabilities, the range of auxiliary
aids or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that
services are accessible might include... accessible websites.”
If your site is older than few years you may unknowingly be breaching the act or you could wrongly be under the impression that your website does not count and be liable to prosecution.
Benefits:
There are 18.6 million registered disabled people in the United Kingdom. That's about 14% of the population. 14% who may not be able to access your website. Without sounding too mercenary what would you give for 14% more customers?
Visual impairments such as colour blindness can also effect a user's experience of a site and 9% of the population have some form of colour-blindness according to the Institution of Electrical Engineers and accoding to the RNIB 4% have some sort of sight problem. So you can see from a moral and business point of view it makes sense to have an accessible website.
How We Can Help:
We aim to make all our sites at least Section 508 and WCAG 1.0 compliant. Whilst the former is a United States Act it offers a good baseline to work from when creating an accessible site. We also code all of sites we develop to be as W3C web standards compliant as possible which also means your site will work in all modern browsers as well as mobile phones and PDAs.
If you would like us to perform an accessibility audit on your site or would like a quote on bringing your site up to scratch then please contact us .
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