Website Accessibility
Did you know that in 2000 the Olympic Committee was successfully sued by a visually impaired website visitor for not making their website accessible? Don't know the benefits of making your site accessible to all and the legal implications if you do not? Then read on...
Accessibility is a massive subject and we would not hope to cover it all here but we believe it is important for you to know how it affects your business and how Slingshot can make sure that your site is accessible to the largest audience possible.
Accessibility, Accessibility, Accessibility
Firstly, what is website accessibility? The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines web accessibility as:
www.w3c.org
Basically it means ensuring that your site is viewable to over 8 million disabled people in the UK alone.
Visually impaired users browse the web using a number of methods depending on their requirements. Most will use software called screen readers. Screen readers look at the text of a website and read it out to the user so they can still interact with the website. Screen readers cannot understand certain site layouts if they do not conform to w3c's guidelines. As such the information these people receive can be delivered out of order and in most cases in a way that will not allow the user to progress on in the site. In addition most sites contain many different images to portray different aspects of your company. If you have images, screen readers do not know what these images are if you do not provide alternative descriptions for the images so the effect that they can have on visitors is lost immediately for screen readers and text only browsers.
So the question becomes: why would you want to stop over 8 million potential customers in the UK alone from using your site?
Slingshot can help to develop your site to W3C's AAA checkpoint - the highest accessibility compliancy W3C provide. This ensures all people, of all disabilities can navigate around your site - no matter if they are using a screen reader, brail pad, viewing it on a Mac or viewing it on a PC.
The Technical Bit
For those of you who are interest in how we achieve AAA checkpoint accessibility we have included an overview as to how we help to achieve this. These techniques include:
- Use of advanced cascading Style Sheet (CSS) techniques to ensure that your website is compatible to all visitors, visually impaired or not.
- We ensure all images we place on your site contain alternative information so that if the visitor is using a text only browser or screen reader they can still understand what information the image is trying to portray
- All media (audio and video) we place on your site includes descriptions so everyone can understand the message you are trying to get across
- All links included on your site contain relevant text. For example no 'click here' links but descriptive text like 'view our portfolio' is used.
- Validation - we validate our accessible sites against W3C's standards to ensure it passes their AAA checkpoints. This means only the highest level of html is used on your site
The Legal Bit
Since the 1st October 2004 new legislation was introduced under the "Disability Discrimination Act" (DDA) to ensure that goods, services and products meet accessibility standards - This also applies to websites. In fact this law as been around since 1999 but has more recently been tailored to websites.
As we stated in our opening paragraph, This law (which is almost identical to that in australian law) was put to the test in an australian court and the Australian Olympic Committee was fined 20,000 dollars for failing to make their website accessible.
In the UK the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) has served notice that they will be taking legal action against companies who fail to meet this legislation in the near future, so we are set for similiar action against companies who continue to maintain sites which disabled people are unable to use.
So how likely are you to be caught and what are the repercussions? Well this depends on how popular your site is / how many people visit it and hence the likelyhood for it to be reported, but ignorance is not innocence. Most likely you may be approached by someone with a disability and asked to make changes and thats where it will end. At the worst case DRC may ask you to make changes and if unchecked they may then take it further. However the main point of this law is to allow disabled people the same rights as everyone else so luckily the end game with this legislation is to create accessible sites - not draw first blood at the courts
Accessibility Benefits
In short the benefits of making sure your website is accessible are:
- Boost your website's reach to over 8 million disabled user, which a combined spending power of over 50 billion per year (Institute of Employment Studies Statistic).
- Improve your website experience for all visitors. It has been shown by the DRC that on average accessible websites are 35% quicker and easier to use than non-accessible ones (www.drc-gb.com) so why not allow users to get to your products and services quicker?
- Ensure your website is future proof and easily updatable in future years.
- Avoid any legal implications by making sure you are protected immediately.
- Achieve a good level of accessibility and be proud of it - W3C offers logo's stating that your company has gone to the effort of ensuring accessible websites - showing you understand the needs of your customers.
Contact Us
Want to find out more about accessibility and how Slingshot can help? contact us ?
21st Jul by Stu
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