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Website_Accessibility_explained_ _what_YOU_can_do
| Website Accessibility explained - what YOU can do
Standard society The widespread use of standards to facilitate
equality is familiar in our society. Just as buildings must be
designed to be accessible to everyone, so must websites be. The
Internet was founded on the principles of accessibility; however
most websites currently fail to comply with even the most basic
level of accessibility, currently rendering the internet largely
obsolete to around 100 million people.
Legal obligations A 100 million-strong global audience is hardly
a market not worth targeting. There has always been a sound
business case, as well as a moral impetus, for web
accessibility. Now there is also a legal obligation to make your
website accessible to disabled users.
The 1999 Disability Discrimination Act makes it clear that
information online should be accessible to disabled people.
Although there has been no UK court action to date, there have
been high profile cases in other countries where claimants have
been awarded significant compensation for disability
discrimination as a result of a non-compliant website.
The UK Disability Rights Commission recently announced that one
thousand websites will be investigated for their ability to be
accessed by Britain's 8.5 million disabled people. You should
comply with the Disability Discrimination laws as a matter of
best practice. Everyone will benefit from your accessibility,
including you.
W3C-WAI The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was created in
October 1994 to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential,
partly by creating some common standards to ensure
interoperability. This commitment includes promoting a high
degree of usability for people with disabilities.
The 'Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0' (WCAG) is a W3C
specification providing guidance on accessibility of Web sites
for people with disabilities. Developed by the W3C's Web
Accessibility Initiative (W3C-WAI), the specification contains
fourteen guidelines which are general principles of accessible
design. These guidelines not only make pages more accessible to
people with disabilities, they make them more accessible to all
users, including those using different technologies to view the
pages. The WAI home page (www.w3.org/WAI) has up-to-date
information on the Web Accessibility Initiative.
Accessibility levels Legally, you achieve web accessibility
determined on how your site measures up against the de-facto
W3C-WAI standards. These standards point to 3 levels of web
accessibility:
A - Which legally you must comply with.
AA - Which you should achieve; or your site will still be
inaccessible to a large number of people.
AAA - Which should be aspired towards as far as is possible.
Achieving accessibility Practical measures you can take include
structuring the site so that it will work with a screen-reader;
ensuring the site can be navigated without the aid of a mouse;
and enabling viewers to change the text size and background
colours.
Ensure that you provide alt-tags for sounds and video, not just
for images; and make sure that the text you provide is
descriptive (i.e. not 'company logo'). You should also make use
of descriptive links (i.e. not 'click here' or 'learn more'), as
screen-readers read links out of context.
How to check your site There are many partly-automated
'accessibility checkers' on the web (the most well known being
Bobby: bobby.watchfire.com and the most thorough being Site
Valet: valet.webthing.com/access/url.html); which assess
websites against their interpretations of the W3C-WAI
guidelines. You can use these 'checkers' to see how your website
fares accessibility-wise, but you must not rely on them.
Accessibility checkers can't be perfect, and it must be
emphasised that a website is not accessible just because one or
more says so. For example, most don't check whether alternative
image text is appropriate; and those that do mostly get it
wrong. (Believe it or not, technology still has its
limitations)… The checkers can also (less commonly) note
accessibility issues where there are none, due to their
interpretation of the guidelines.
Does accessible = boring? Accessibility does not mean that your
website has to be black and white, boring, or text-only. Many
sites have used text-only pages as a solution to accessibility;
however by following the W3C guidelines it should be unnecessary
in almost all cases to go down this route.
Take a look around www.fwoss.com. Our site is neither colourless
nor dull, yet it is AAA compliant throughout. Accessible
websites do not need to be designed very differently to
inaccessible ones; they just need to be carefully constructed
with flexibility in mind.
What you can do Getting your website accessible need not be a
headache if you go to a qualified software development company.
Make sure you run their website through one of the above
checkers first, to see how it fairs.
About the author:
Polly is the research director for Fire Without Smoke Software
Ltd (FWOSS)
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