Does Web Accessibility Matter?

Introduction

This FAQ aims to cover the issues of accessibility related to websites.

What do we mean by accessible?

When we talk about accessibility, we mean making your website easy to use, approachable and functional for the widest range of visitors possible. This means everyone, from all walks of life — not just those who have perfect eyesight, who have a brand new PC, who have broadband or who use large monitors. Some examples of people we're concerning are :

People with visual disabilities.
Elderly people unused to computer interaction.
People using PDAs and mobile phones to access the internet.
People connecting to the internet via dial-up.
People accessing the internet through their TV.
People accessing the internet without the use of a mouse.

Why is it important?

Web accessibility is about ensuring your website reaches the largest audience possible. There are many extra benefits that come for free, but this is the core reason for making your website accessible. This should be reason enough to care about accessibility, but if that hasn’t swayed your opinion, then take note that UK law has the power to punish websites that are inaccessible. The Disability Rights Commission published a Code of Practice in May 2002 relating to the Disability Discrimination Act. This document clearly references the need for accessible websites in several places. e.g.

2.2 (p7): “The Act makes it unlawful for a service provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide any service which it provides to members of the public.”

4.7 (p39): “From 1st October 1999 a service provider has to take reasonable steps to change a practice which makes it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to make use of its services.”

For proof of similar legislation in effect, in 2000 a blind man successfully sued the organizing committee of the Sydney Olympics for their failure to make their website accessible.

What measures have to be taken?

There are several guidelines in ensuring your website is accessible. Although vague in certain areas, the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines provide an extensive checklist for website content developers and designers. The W3C also grade accessibility into 3 levels, A, AA and AAA. Validation of these grades is entirely down to the authors of the website, although a website’s rating can be verified through 3rd party websites, such as Cynthia and Bobby.

Although by no means exhaustive, this is a brief checklist of issues to be aware of :

Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element.
Ensure that all information conveyed with color is also available without color.
Clearly identify changes in the language of a document’s text.
Organize documents so they may be read without style sheets.
Avoid causing the screen to flicker.
Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site’s content.
Use header elements to convey document structure.
Mark up lists and list items properly.
Mark up quotations. Do not use quotation markup for formatting effects.
Avoid deprecated features of W3C technologies.

What benefits will I achieve?

Aside from the moral and legal issues involved in making your website accessible, there are many added benefits :

Easier to update: By building a website in an accessible manner (using XHTML & CSS) your website will be easier to manage and update (stylistic changes can be deployed by the editing of a single file, the CSS stylesheet).
Quicker to download: Your website will also be significantly smaller in file size as a result of cleaner markup, resulting in quicker download times and lower bandwidth charges.
Future-proof: A website built in this manner will also be compatible with emerging browsing technologies, such as PDA’s, mobile phones and in-car browsers — a market that grows larger every year.
Search engine success: By making your website more accessible to humans, it also becomes more accessible to search engines. Search engines use ‘spiders’ to read the content on a website (called indexing) and if your website is built in an accessible manner, you’ll be rewarded by accurate and high result rankings.