Disability Discrimination and Website Accessibility

Most of us take for granted how easy it is to use the web. We look at the visual presentation of a web page, quickly scanning the content and navigation then homing in on the part of interest using our eyes, the mouse and keyboard. The web works so well as a medium if you can see. Ignoring the vagaries of a particular design and the quirks of the various browsers the web presents information in a largely visual format that suits most of us.

Now what happens if we take away some of the things most of us take for granted. How easy is it to use web pages when our sight is taken away, can we navigate pages when our mouse or keyboard is taken away? Now the web doesn’t look like such an attractive place – barriers are in place. This is the predicament of many disabled people.

It is a tragedy to discriminate against disabled people on the web simply through lack of thought, consideration or awareness. Many websites that are designed without considering accessibility could result in alienating visitors and losing potential sales.

The internet should be a wonderful tool for communicating, learning, interacting, shopping, entertainment … for everyone.

Doors have been opened for disabled people with the internet providing new opportunities and more freedom so they have potentially more to gain than the able bodied. Disabled people represent approximately 12% of the adult population in the UK, so why exclude them? The internet has huge potential for people with disabilities!

Standards and Guidelines

To address this issue the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is a working group set up within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) responsible for setting web accessibility guidelines. Read more about the W3C Guidelines.

The UK Disability Discrimination Act 1995 has bought about changes in legislation resulting in the need for companies to adhere to accessibility issues. Disability discrimination is illegal in the UK and companies could find themselves being sued if their website is not accessible. Read about the legal issues in the UK.

Compliance with the standards and guidelines takes a significant effort on the part of the website designer and the content editors. The principles are straight forward but the detailed implementation is not so straight forward. The basic principles are:

• Pages that transform gracefully
  • Separate content from presentation.
  • Provide text and text equivalents of all auditory and visual content. Text can be rendered in ways that are available to almost all browsing devices and accessible to almost all users.
  • Create documents that work even if the user cannot see and/or hear. Provide information that serves the same purpose or function as audio or video in ways suited to alternate sensory channels as well. This does not mean creating a prerecorded audio version of an entire site to make it accessible to users who are blind. Users who are blind can use screen reader technology to render all text information in a page.
  • Create documents that do not rely on one type of hardware. Pages should be usable by people without mice, with small screens, low resolution screens, black and white screens, no screens, with only voice or text output, etc.
• Make content understandable and navigable
  • Making the language clear and simple
  • Providing understandable mechanisms for navigating within and between pages. Providing navigation tools and orientation information in pages will maximize accessibility and usability. Not all users can make use of visual clues such as image maps, proportional scroll bars, side-by-side frames, or graphics that guide sighted users of graphical desktop browsers. Users also lose contextual information when they can only view a portion of a page, either because they are accessing the page one word at a time (speech synthesis or braille display), or one section at a time (small display, or a magnified display). Without orientation information, users may not be able to understand very large tables, lists, menus, etc.
    

There are specific checkpoints associated with all of the basic principles. Each checkpoint is set a priority level (1, 2 or 3) so that comformance can be assessed against each level. Read more about conformance levels.

Why you should not ignore website accessibility requirements

To ignore website accessibility raises moral issues (discrimination), business issues (why exclude potential customers) and legal issues (in the UK and elsewhere).

For some this will already be important as government and public sector organisations are directed to follow the accessibility standards. In the private sector there is less direct pressure as yet as the full force of the law has not been in the UK however the momentum is gathering. Allowance is being made for the issues the designers and web site owners face in complying fully with the standards.

What is involved in making a website accessible?

For some building in accessibility into your website will be straight-forward and can be handled as part of the ongoing development and maintenance of the website. For others accessibility guidelines will mean a more in depth look at the website design and technologies used, setting targets and standards for on going maintenance.

Our commitment to accessibility

This site has been set up to create and promote an awareness of the issues involving website accessibility, in particular, website access for disabled people.

We intend to help website owners understand accessibility issues in their own sites and provide a place for people (disabled or not) with accessibility problems to bring their issues to the attention of web site designers and owners.

We invite contributions to this site from people who

• have accessibility issues themselves
• want to promote awareness of website accessibility
• want to highlight good and bad cases of websites accessibility
• want to help make this site more useful

If you have a contribution to make, why not fill in our contributions form.

In addition, our Accessibility Survey will assist us in learning and understanding more about the different problems faced by disabled people when using the Internet. So if you are disabled and would like to contribute your concerns and ideas, we would love to hear from you. We will take an active interest in your comments and keep our readers informed.

Please note that all personal details will remain confidential.