Community News

Website Accessilbity and how it affects your business website!

Whether you are aware of it or not, website accessibility is a big issue for your business website. Many businesses, large or small fail to consider disabled access to their website despite new legislation and current guidelines for website development/design.
 
So what's all the fuss about? Why not visit the following link to see an online demonstration of how a poorly designed website can prevent disabled users from accessing information or buying products and services. Once you've viewed the demo, come back to this page and read on...
 
click this link to see Disability Rights Commission - Inaccessible Website Online Demo

Here is a quote from the RNIB's website section on Accessibility, I think this sum's up the issue very well
 
"By not applying best practice accessibility guidelines to building websites, designers and managers can run the risk of excluding the people they want to attract, and not just people with disabilities".

Some useful tools for accessibility:
 
Try checking your site with the Lynx Viewer

Accessibility - Business Benefits

An accessible website provides your business with a wider potential audience and greater market share.
 
Improved usability always encourages visitors to:

1. encourages website visitors to stay longer 
2. encourages website visitors to come back 
3. encourages website visitors to become customers and buy something from you 

Examples of good usability:

1. clear, clean and consistent navigation so that your users can find the information they want easily and quickly 
2. excellent content, explains images and logos so that those who can't see the image know what the content is about - add interesting text and other content. 

It's cheaper to update your website if your designer uses accessible Cascading Style Sheets as part of the design, then if you change a heading colour or font style to make it easier to read or use a higher 'contrast' between backround and text colour, then you only change this information on the stylesheet, not hundreds of times across your website - so it saves you money!

Accessibility - the Legal Arguments

Here are some excerpts from the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 relevant to the legal compliance of websites.
 
Excerpt from the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 1995, Section III
 
19. - (1) It is unlawful for a provider of services to discriminate against a disabled person-
 
(a) in refusing to provide, or deliberately not providing, to the disabled person any service which he provides, or is prepared to provide, to members of the public;
 
(b) in failing to comply with any duty imposed on him by section 21 in circumstances in which the effect of that failure is to make it impossible or unreasonably difficult for the disabled person to make use of any such service;
 
(c) in the standard of service which he provides to the disabled person or the manner in which he provides it to him; or
 
(d) in the terms on which he provides a service to the disabled person.