Designing an Accessible Site
There are a variety of legal and practical reasons for site owners and developers to implement accessibility within their web site.
Legal Requirements
The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) is the specific UK law that could be used to enforce, accessibility:
To date, there have been no cases in the UK in which an organisation has been prosecuted for having an inaccessible web site. However, the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) has challenged organisations for not providing accessible web sites. In these cases, the organisation in question has changed its site to comply with accessibility guidelines, rather than face legal action.
Practical reasons for ensuring that your web site is accessible
- It will ensure that your site adheres to the 'effective practice' web site development standards that are being developed. An accessible web site frequently looks more professional than a non-accessible site.
- There is a strong link between usability and accessibility - accessible web sites have been proven to be more usable than other sites . This means that everyone, irrespective of ability, will be able to use your site and understand the content more effectively.
- By following the W3C recommendations, you are more likely to create a site that is platform-, browser- and device-independent. This will also help 'future proof' your site against internet developments, new browsers and the use of mobile devices and PDA's to access the web.
- Accessible sites are more portable and generally cost less to maintain.
- Providing text alternatives for images, video and audio files and other non-text objects will make your content more widely available, and will also help your site improve its ranking on search engines.
- Accessible web sites generally download quicker than web sites with poor accessibility. If the site takes longer than eight seconds to load, then you can be sure that most visitors will click away. Accessible web site will also save on your server bandwidth costs.
- All visitors to your site (irrespective of disability) will have different preferences as to how they want the site to display (for example, different colours or font sizes). An accessible web site will be more responsive to browser settings, and therefore the user can choose how the site displays to them.
Let us check your site for accessibility
If you believe that your web site does not meet the current accessibility standards, we can check your site and prepare a summary report.
After reviewing this "no obligation" report and find that our recommendations are of interest, we can prepare a more detailed proposal with costs and time scales.
Please take a few minutes to fill in the simple request form below and we will send you our report normally within 5 working days.