Accessibility

"Accessibility" is a word that almost anyone who is involved in commissioning, creating or maintaining a website has heard. It's also a word which is often misrepresented and misunderstood.

The aim of this short article is to provide a brief overview of the meaning, guidelines and legal requirements for web accessibility in the UK.

What is web accessibility?

Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities.

The W3C provide a set of guidelines under the heading of "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines" (WCAG) (read the WCAG), these are widely accepted as the definitive guidelines to building accessible websites.

In the UK there is also a document produced by the British Standards Institute (BSI) headed "PAS 78: Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites" (read PAS 78) which provides information on;

the steps that should be taken to commission accessible websites;
the W3C guidelines and specifications to be adopted;
the role of the guidelines and specifications, software tools and user testing within the development life cycle.

It is important to be aware that these documents are provided as guides to website accessibility, they are not rules and they are not the law.

Section 508 is sometimes referred to in relation to accessibility. The Section 508 document is specific to the USA and is not covered in this article. You can read more about section 508 on Wikipedia

What are the benefits to providing accessible web content?

There are a number of good reasons to make your website accessible, including;

To comply with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995/2005 (DDA) (read the DDA),
To widen your websites audience, the Family Resource Survey (read more about the survey) found that there are almost 10 million disabled people in the UK with a combined spending power in the region of 80 billion pounds per annum.
As a rule of thumb content that is accessible is also visible to search engines which can help lead to higher ranking.
Accessible content can often be redistributed through other mediums such as mobile phones.

The W3C provides a comprehensive guide to
building a web accessibility business case for your organisation

What are the legal requirements for website accessibility?

This is a very common question from clients, and there is no definitive answer, current legislation is often non-specific regarding websites.

To date no UK company has been sued for not complying, however two large companies have been contacted by the RNIB regarding accessibility issues with their websites. Both the companies made changes to resolve the accessibility issues rather than risk legal action.

It is worth considering that there are two cases of non-UK companies being sued for not complying with website accessibility legislation. Below are links to articles on the cases;

The W3C provides a list of links to
UK web accessibility policy documents.

How can I test if my website is accessible?

Many companies use a combination of automatic and manual testing to monitor the accessibility of their web content.

Manual testing by an accessibility expert can provide a true assessment regarding the level of accessibility your website achieves, but for websites with a large amount of content it can prove impractical and costly.

Automated tests using software applications allow large amounts of content to be tested in a very short period of time, but the value of these tests is limited to highlighting potential issues, the results cannot be considered as a guarantee of accessibility.

If you're interested in testing the accessibility of your website, please get in touch. We can provide manual testing and have developed software (view Atmos) for testing large websites cost effectively.

The End

Hopefully you found this article helpful, if you have any questions or suggestions for improving the article please contact me - Anthony Blackshaw <ant@getme.co.uk>.

Regulations and web practices change often, this article was written on the 7th of February 2009 and may no longer be current.