Accessible Websites

What is an accessible website?

Well, it's simple really.

There are between 10-11 million people in the UK with some form of disability (source - Equality and Human Rights Commission) - that's about one in seven of the population. If your website isn't accessible you could be turning away potential customers as well as falling foul of the law.

We think it makes sense to have an accessible website. This means that internet uers who have visual or motor impairments can also experience the pleasures and benefits of the worldwide web.

With a combined disposable income of around £50 billion a year it would be crazy to turn this business away.

The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) makes it illegal for companies to provide an inferior service to, or discriminate against, a disabled person. This legislation extends to websites.
In March 2003 the Disability Rights Commission announced its decision to test 1000 websites for accessibility. There was no intent to name and shame or indeed take legal action. It was an exercise to ascertain the level of accessibility awareness and implementation in websites across the UK.

The results, published in April 2004, were astonishing. Only 0.2% of the sites tested achieved anything like the level of accessibility deemed acceptable. More alarmingly, 81% of the tested sites failed to reach the most basic accessibility guidelines.
So now would be a good time to get your website checked out.
We can carry out a Website Access Audit on your existing site - enabling you to plan your path to compliance with the DDA.

We offer advice on the marketability of your website e.g. looking at the site meta tags and headings. These are what some search engines look for (like you or I would scan through a newspaper or magazine to pick out any article we are interested in).

We can also validate the HTML, CSS, XHTML or even XML coding this helps speed up the down loading time of you site. I would describe it like a grammar check.

Advice can also be given on any PDF’s attachments these should always be considered as an integral part of the site under the recommendations with PAS 78 published by the British Standards Institute.