Accessibility

The benefits of an accessible website go far beyond making it accessible to disabled users. Your able users will find it easier to use and the search engines will rank you higher. This page looks at your obligations and how meeting them can help improve your website.

Why you should take accessibility seriously

In the UK we are obliged to make our websites accessible to everyone, regardless of any disability that they might suffer. This obligation comes from the Disability Discrimination Act 2006. At is simplest accessibility is about meeting those obligations. (See DDA Compliance - your obligations to find out more.)

But accessibility should go beyond this. The function of a website is to deliver content to its visitors. A truly accessible site is one that is easy for everyone to use, whether or not they are disabled, regardless of the platform that they use to access and not forgetting your non-human visitors, who can be very important indeed.

Understanding your users' needs

Your primary user group will probably be able bodied people accessing your site through a PC. Usability is a key concern for this group: your site should be well structured and easy to use no matter how they want to access it.

You are legally required to consider disabled peoples' needs when developing your website. Failure to do so will alienate them (and their friends and relations) as a user group and put you in breach of the DDA. You need to consider both the physical limitation when using a standard PC as well as the requirements of the specific technologies that they use (for example, screen readers for blind people).

A third angle to accessibility is cross-platform accessibility. This means making your website content accessible through multiple platforms, mobile phones, PDAs and webTV for starters.

The final group of users are "non-human", you need to consider the search engine robots and crawlers whose co-operation you need in order to appear in the all important search engines.

6 reasons to make your site accessible?

Legal requirement - A website which makes it unnecessarily difficult for a person with disabilities to access your content, products and services is against the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 1995.

NB - there is as yet no precedent for the enforcement of this requirement. The test cases that have been brought have been settled out of court (the offending companies tend to shy away from the adverse publicity a court battle would entail) and the requirement seems to be to make an undertaking to take appropriate steps to fix the problem. Whilst this is the reason that accessibility is on the agenda, in practical terms it is one of the least compelling reasons to do it! (IMPORTANT - this is not legal advice, do not rely on it!)

Basic economics - an accessible website allows your products and services to be potentially accessed by the largest possible market. There are 10 million people with disabilities in the UK alone. A huge potential market sector that you could be missing out on due to an inaccessible website.

Best practice - accessible sites are built following best practice for web development. Compliant sites tend to be easy to use, search engine friendly, cross platform compatible and easy to maintain and update.

Search engines - search engines are could be described as the ultimate disabled user. They can't see images and have no cognitive ability. Their requirements are very similar to those for disabled people and they are key users of your site, assuming you want to promote your offering. A site that is accessible to disabled people will also be accessible to Google.

Cross platform compatibility- web content is increasingly accessed through devices other than computers. PDAs and mobile phones are the obviousl ones, but also games consoles and webTV.

Why not - there really isn't much reason not to. There are relatively few constraints or direct costs involved with accessibility compliance. As long as your designers know and understand what it's all about and your developers work to best practice, all sites should meet the basic W3C standard, unless you have a good reason not to.

What to do about it

If you already have a website, we offer an Accessibility Audit to assess the accessibility of your website and how to improve it. If you are looking to get one, make sure that the people you use understand accessiblity, because it's important and because if they don't then they are not following widely accepted best practice.

BarnesGraham is based in Bristol and London, although we service clients across the UK. If you would like to find out more about accessibility, please drop us a line; we'd be delighted to talk to you.