Councils waste £11 million per month
According to a recent SOCITIM report nearly half of the people who visit council websites fail to find what they are looking for. This equates to nearly 25,000 unsatisfied visitors a month. If these people then use the 'phone or a meeting instead then councils are losing £11m of potential savings every month.
Usable accessibility for public sector websites
Disability Discrimination Act 2005 places a duty on all public authorities, when carrying out their functions, in particular they need to:
- promote equality of opportunity between disabled persons and other persons
- eliminate discrimination that is unlawful under the Act
- encourage participation by disabled persons in public life
- take account of disabled persons’ disabilities, even where that involves treating disabled persons more favourably than other persons.
The UK government is committed to ensuring that all public sector websites offer equality of access to every member of the community.
Business and social factors
In addition to meeting your legal requirements, an effective web site should also be a major component of your self-service strategy. The potential savings (and service improvement) from having a usable and accessible web site are impressive. According to Socitm, "customer self-service must move up the agenda if councils are to meet future demand against a background of static or falling budgets". This advice is based on the fact that self-service is considerably cheaper for the council and popular with council customers.
Accessible websites also reduce costs by using less bandwidth and being easier to maintain.
An accessible website helps to build an inclusive society. For many disabled people an accessible website provides a "life enhancing" experience by allowing them to manage their own affairs. Assistive software and tools enable anyone with a disability to fully interact with an accessible website.
How we can help
Userite has already helped a number of Local Authorities and government departments reach the required standard and, more importantly, to acquire the knowledge and skills required to maintain an accessible and effective web presence. We specialise in web accessibility testing and advising clients on ways to improve their site's accessibility and usability.
Website testing
Our testing focuses on the key tasks that customers perform. The testing process starts by validating the engineering and the structure of the site to ensure that it complies with international standards for code compliance, semantic structure and accessibility. Once our engineers have completed their tests we ask a panel of disabled users to perform selected tasks using a variety of assistive software and tools. The tests cover the whole journey to ensure that all customers can complete what they came to the web site to do. The results are presented in a Pass/Fail table format with brief explanations of important issues.
Web site Audit Report
Our detailed reports analyse each potential barrier on the web site and provide relevant, cost-effective practical solutions. We review the content, style, navigation and engineering of the site to provide a comprehensive breakdown of the issues affecting accessibility and usability. We explain why each problem creates a barrier for disabled customers, how you can fix the current problem and avoid introducing it in future. We aim to provide you with realistic solutions that are practical within your current framework and able to improve the quality of customer experience for everyone.
We provide six months on-line support so you can confidently achieve an effective web site that complies with the latest guidelines for accessibility and usability.
Training
We have our own e-learning course which covers all the fundamental issues relating to web accessibility including how disabled people access the web and how to build and maintain accessible web sites. In addition we offer scheduled courses in general accessibility awareness and more detailed workshops for website designers, engineers and content providers.
Support Packages
Individual support packages provide everything you need to make sure that as you develope your website it is fully accessible - and stays that way! At the heart of any support package would normally be the training and advice required to enable you to continue the "accessibility journey" with minimum cost and maximum quality.
Contact us now
You can contact us using one of the following methods -
- Use our on-line contact form
- Email us at sales@userite.com
- Telephone us on 0208 545 2886
- Fax us on 0208 543 8748
- Write to us - Userite, Website Auditing Limited, 8 The Coles Shop, LONDON, SW19 2RD