Website accessibility

The business and legal cases for improving website accessibility for disabled people remain misunderstood, and a potentially valuable audience is left disenfranchised by inaccessible websites. John Bates of hc solicitors LLP takes a look at this area:

What is the problem?

A 2004 investigation by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) surveyed 1,000 websites and found that 81% failed to meet basic access standards. The average 'home page' contained 108 barriers to access. Some 10 million people in the UK have rights under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) with an estimated annual spending power of £80bn.

The legal case

Websites are included within the DDA, which generally makes it unlawful to discriminate against disabled people when providing services, providing education, and recruiting and employing people. The part of the DDA dealing with websites came into force on 1 October 1999. A Code of Practice for this part of the Act was published on 27 May 2002.

What is discrimination?

Discrimination can occur by:

• Treating a disabled person less favourably, or
• Failing to make 'reasonable adjustments' to enable disabled people to use services, education and engage in recruitment processes.
  

What are 'reasonable adjustments'?

Adjustments can include changes to procedures and physical features. What is ’reasonable’ ultimately is a decision for the courts, but depends on:

• The type of service provided.
• The type of organisation.
• The resources available.
• The impact on the disabled person.
  

What are the legal risks?

A disabled person could bring a claim against a business if the website makes it impossible or unreasonably difficult to access information and services. If you have not made reasonable adjustments and cannot show that this failure is justified, then a court may order you to pay compensation and to change your site.

What are the business benefits?

The business benefits include:

• Increased audience reach and market share.
• Improved usability.
• Reduced website maintenance costs.
• Potential improvement of search engine listings.
• Ease of transfer of accessible site content to other media.
• Greater compatibility and future-proofing.
  

Is your website compliant?

For further information please contact John Bates Director, Commercial Team john.bates@hcsolicitors.co.uk

The essentials

To complement John’s article, here are five tips from Titman Firth on the practicalities of improving website accessibility:

1. Comply with W3C standards

Ensure your site is validated to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for both HTML and CSS (cascading style sheets). Visit http://www.w3.org

for more details about W3C.

2. Comply with WAI and Section 508

It's important to comply with W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), and Section 508 is a useful accessibility benchmark.

3. Give users the ability to increase text size

This is one of the simplest ways to improve usability for visually impaired visitors.

4. Make sure visitors can use screen readers

For people with serious visual impairments, it is vital that nothing about your site prevents them from using screen readers which convert text to voice.

5. Ensure your site is viewable in all major browsers

Some websites work fine if the visitor is using the latest version of Internet Explorer, but not with some other web browsers.

Please get in touch if you would like to discuss any accessibility issues that you might have with your website.

© hc solicitors LLP/Titman Firth 2006