Accessibility is becoming increasingly important to all website owners. In addition to the enactment of UK anti-discrimination legislation and future European requirements there are also very sound business reasons for building and maintaining a website that is “accessible to all”

Some of the key points which this paper explains are as follows :

Introduction

Websites have now become an integral part of any business marketing and promotion policy. A well-designed website will stay open 24 hours a day throughout the world. Even if you do not actually do business over the Internet, your website’s address will be included on your business cards and company advertisements so that potential clients and customers can readily check on your company profile and take their time to find about your products and services.

However, the World Wide Web is only just over ten years old and, like any teenager, it can be a little unruly at times. This relative immaturity and a lack of regulation is both a source of strength and a weakness. It allows the expression of both individual creativity and individual irresponsibility! As a result, all Web users are likely to experience frustration from time to time, and any site visited can prove to be a “learning experience”. However disabled people must frequently overcome more obstacles than other users before they can enjoy the full range of information, services, entertainment and social interaction offered by the Web.

For example, blind people need sites to provide text as an alternative to images so that their specially designed screenreading devices can read out the relevant description. Partially sighted people may require large format text and effective colour contrast. People who are dyslexic or have cognitive impairments may benefit from the use of simpler English and from the clear and logical layout of an uncluttered website.

People whose first language is not English may also find “Plain English” indispensable; and people with manual dexterity impairments may need to navigate with a keyboard rather than with a mouse. According the Disability Rights Commission “Irresponsible and inconsiderate design not only puts disabled users at a significant disadvantage but can make life unnecessarily difficult for everyone, whether disabled or not.”

When it works properly, the Web has enormous potential for disabled people. In contrast to other information media, the Web can be manipulated and presented in a wide variety of formats including large print, audio, braille and even sign language. By including some simple accessibility techniques into a website design these alternative means of access enable everyone to benefit from the Web, without making a site any less attractive to unimpaired users. For example, the following screen shots of a Web page shown below look the same to a sighted user, but only the right hand version provides useful information to blind people and search engines.

Screen shot of w web page that does not have alternative text tags

This web page does not have any alternative text tags so a blind user, or a search robot, will only be presented with the file names of the images. See the machine readable output of this page below.

Text output is only able to list the image file names.

 

Screenshot of a web page that does have alternative text tags

This web page looks exactly the same, but because the author has included alternative text tags, blind users and search robots are presented with the same content in text form as shown below.

Text output showing the alternative text for each image

Making a website accessible does not change the look of the pages, but it does mean that the housebound and disabled can have the independence to shop and manage their own affairs without the support of others.

Financial Benefits of an Accessible website

To be accessible a website needs to be engineered correctly, have a logical and “user-friendly” interface and be presented in a style and language suitable to the needs of the end user. By specifying that a new website should meet the basic accessibility standards the commissioning agent therefore ensures that the final site will be correctly engineered and effective in a wide range of situations.

The initial creation of a website that meets all the accessibility guidelines does require a little more effort and care. There will probably be a need for some extra training, and more time will be required by engineers to provide labels for forms and by authors to write up alternative text for images etc. But this extra effort is normally offset by the site’s improved reliability, portability and the consequent reduction in time and effort testing the site on different platforms. The biggest savings, however, come from reduced maintenance costs. Because an accessible website is properly constructed, the underlying code is logical and standardised. This makes it is easier for technicians to add or change elements of the site, even if they were not involved in the initial design. Engineers and authors are less likely to make mistakes when editing accessible websites.

Upgrading an existing site in order to make it accessible will almost certainly be more expensive than incorporating accessibility into the initial design. The amount of effort required to “retrofit accessibility” will vary greatly. If the site was originally built using a small set of standard templates and stylesheets it may be possible to upgrade the whole site simply by editing these templates. In this case the reduced maintenance costs will more than offset the upgrading costs. However for complex sites that do not use templates, the costs of retrofitting accessibility could be considerable. Improvements in “findability” and customer satisfaction may offset some of these costs, but consideration should also be given to taking this opportunity to undertake a complete overhaul. The legal requirement to provide an accessible website may prove to be the catalyst required for a complete re-appraisal of the company’s Internet marketing policy.

Because, by definition, accessible websites are well engineered they tend to be more efficient, requiring less band-width and providing a faster service. Although these financial savings are relatively small they do have an environmental as well as financial benefit.

In addition to making savings on running costs, an accessible website will increase the use of the website by making it easier to find, more user-friendly and effective for non-disabled users whilst extending the reach of the site to the 20% of people who have some form of disability. This increased usage will not only increase sales (or levels of awareness) but it will also reduce the level of customer support services required by allowing more people to interact with your business on-line. Saving the host organisation personnel and paper. Because an accessible website is designed to work well on a variety of applications and media it is easy for users to print out the content using their preferred medium, be it large print, special colours or braille, thus also reducing your business printing costs.

Engineering for reliability and portability

Structure of a web page
Relationship between the elements of a web page

There are two key elements to any Web page. The first element is the page content, (the message that the author wishes to put across to the user). This content is contained in the main HTML page. The second element is the style (the “look and feel”) of the page. A separate style sheet that determines things such as colours and fonts is used to control the style of a page. Images, multimedia and programmed applications can also imported to make the page more interesting, dynamic and interactive. To be accessible it is essential that the content of the page can be determined from the HTML page alone. The stylesheet and images only add visual effect and will be ignored by robots such as search engines and screen readers.

The individual look of your website may depend upon your company profile and the type of client or customer that you are trying to attract. However the underlying code (the engineering that makes a website work) must be accurate so that the site works properly on all sorts of devices, not just computers. Search engine robots, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), Mobile phones, Games consoles such as Wii and Xbox, digital televisions, screen readers used by blind people and remote control devices used by paraplegics all rely upon the accurate engineering of the underlying code.

The World Wide Consortium (W3C) is the internationally approved body that provides the standards for the Web designers to prepare well structure and browser friendly website. All the developers of browser applications (including assistive technology), search engines and Internet robots use these standards when building their tools. To be certain that a website performs reliably on all these different platforms (including those used by disabled people) it is essential that the engineering (HTML) code be applied correctly.

There are a number of tools available for checking that the underlying code is valid. The W3C itself provides such a service at http://validator.w3.org. Using such a service will help reduce page size, ensure that the pages provide the same look on a variety of browsers and increase the chance of obtaining a higher ranking in search engines. websites that are validated are also less affected by browser updates and the development of new Internet browsing technologies.

Heath Robinson's potato peeler

Modern website authoring software allows people who have no knowledge of HTML code to build quite complex websites. However, during the design and maintenance stages this software often introduces additional code or fails to delete redundant code. Authors themselves frequently add extra "patches and fixes” to the code to overcome specific problems. All this extra coding eventually makes the engineering part of the website resemble a Heath Robinson invention - it works, but is clearly not very efficient!

Building HTML code that is both concise and accurate is a skilled task. There will always be a need for a qualified engineer to check that the code is efficient as well as valid.

To improve the accessibility of websites the W3C established an Accessibility Initiative that issued a set of accessibility guidelines in 1999 to help engineers utilise the elements within HTML that make sites accessible. These guidelines have become the “de facto” standard for accessibility and are ordered in three levels of importance.

Level 1 is the absolute minimum standard and will allow most blind users to access the information on a website, however many other disabled users will still find barriers. The second level of importance (Level 2) should provide the vast majority of disabled people with the same level of information and ease of use as non-disabled people. Level 3 guidelines should provide all disabled users with a “user experience” that matches the best the Web has to offer. The UK government and the European parliament have targeted the Level 2 guidelines as being the minimum standard for any site receiving public funds, and this standard should therefore be accepted as the minimum for corporate and general public websites as well.

It is not possible to validate compliance with the accessibility guidelines automatically in the same way as the HTML code. Some tools such as “Bobby” and “Wave” will check for such things as empty alternative text tags, but they will not say whether text tags that do exist are relevant to the image or if the text used for navigation links makes sense out of context. The use of these tools can only be a first step towards testing. There can be no substitute for involving disabled people themselves in design and testing of websites..

The Law

In the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) makes it unlawful for a provider of services to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing or deliberately failing to make its services available to disabled people. Section 21 of the DDA places a duty on those providing services to the public to make such adjustments as are reasonable in the circumstances to ensure that disabled people can access the services. This duty applies whether or not payment is made for the services. A website is a service to the public, whether it is a site selling goods or services, or one which simply provides information, and as such would appear to be subject to the provisions of Part III of the DDA. However, there is no decided case law in the UK concerning the application of the DDA to websites.

The DDA requires service providers to take such steps as are reasonable in the circumstances to ensure that disabled people have access to the services. The Disability Rights Commission has issued a Code of Practice under the DDA giving some guidance as to what is meant by 'reasonable steps'. This Code does not impose any legal obligation, but can be referred to in proceedings under the DDA.

According to the Code what is a reasonable step will depend on a number of factors, including the financial resources of the service provider, the extent to which it is practicable to take the steps and the cost of making adjustments.

The Disability Rights Commission have stated that they believe that much of what is established as good practice relating to website accessibilty within the industry is likely to ensure compliance with the law. However they also state that the industry itself should aim to promote best practice standards that do not just follow the letter of the law but also the spirit of the DDA. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are not referred to in the DDA but a minimum standard of Web accessibility is widely interpreted to mean compliance with all Priority 2 checkpoints of the WCAG.

The relevant quotes from the 175-page Code of Practice are:

Conclusion

The need to make websites accessible can only increase in the future as financial, engineering and social pressures increase. Organisations that respond to these pressures by delivering an inclusive service earlier rather than later will have a distinct market advantage.

Background Reading

 

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