Over recent years online accessibility has become more prominent in the minds of businesses, with the introduction of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) in 1995, revised in 2005. The key aim of the DDA was to tackle the discrimination that disabled people face in society on a daily basis. The DDA also included requirements for websites for be fully accessible throughout the online community.
The Equality Act came into force in October 2010, which replaced the DDA, in England, Scotland and Wales. The DDA & Equality Act are similar in that they both have the aim of tackling the discrimination which many disabled people face.
It is therefore very important to ensure that websites conform to the latest World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines, which will help ensure that your website is fully accessible. The risk of non conformance and having an inaccessible website, is the potential for legal action to be initiated by somebody that is unable to use your website, and as such being discriminated against.
The Equality Act is ‘anticipatory’, which means you cannot wait until a disabled person wants to use your services, but you must think in advance and on an ongoing basis, what disabled people with a range of disabilities might ‘reasonably’ require.
As well as having potential legal implications, there is also a strong business rationale for ensuring websites are fully accessible to disabled users. There are approximately 10 million disabled people in the UK alone with a combined spending power of approximately £80 billion, so an inaccessible website may also result in lost business.
Making a website accessible
To make your website fully accessible it is recommended that conformance to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, Level AA is achieved.
Conformance to these standards, will involve testing a website against a number of guidelines, identifying and resolving any issues. There are a number of potential issues that would prevent your website being accessible to disabled users, with one of the most common being failure to have a meaningful text alternative for images on a website. Not all visitors will be able to see the images so its essential to provide a text alternative, which can be read by assistive technologies, such as screen readers.
Action For Better Access
At WSI Preston we are passionate about creating an internet which is inclusive for all sectors of the online population and we have recently partnered with the UK charity 'Action For Better Access', to provide online accessibility services.
Action for Better Access and WSI will work now together with the common aim of seeking to raise awareness and improve online accessibility for the disabled community.
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