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Web Accessibility and your Small Business website

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Introduction to Accessibility

Accessibility – it’s another one of those passing fads that just happens to be one of the hot topics on the web at the moment. But how many of you are aware of what it means to your business and why should you do anything about it?

To begin, let’s take a look at the driving force behind the need for making things accessible.

The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) became effective on the 2nd December 1996. In addition to employment protection provisions, it became unlawful for service providers to treat disabled people differently just because they were disabled. From the 1st October 1999, service providers had to make “reasonable adjustments” for disabled people, ensuring that extra help was available or changing the way the service was provided.

For those of you who are interested, selecting this link will take you to the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA)

Did you notice that I didn’t use “click here” as the hyperlink? Later on I’ll describe some of the more common mistakes that you’ll find on web sites. Ones that you need to ensure you don’t copy.

Many small businesses now have their own web sites. Some written by professional web developers, others written in-house. They all have one thing in common; since 1st October 1999 it has been the law that all websites and applications are accessible.

You may ask why your website needs to be accessible. The answer is quite simple. A business website offers a service to the public and the business is therefore a service provider.

The important phrase in the DDA is “reasonable adjustment”. On any new website it is reasonable to make it accessible as the extra cost involved is very little. On an existing website where it would be expensive to cover all accessibility issues, the service provider needs to make decisions on what is reasonable to do. A detailed plan of action should be made, outlining the work required and the timescales to achieve accessibility.

Accessibility and Your Web Site

You have a website, it’s a good website. You paid money for it and you’re pleased with it. You have a decent number of visitors a month and sales coming from your website are what you had hoped.

Now try a few simple checks.

Go to your home page and try and resize the text using the options in the browser. Does the text get bigger or smaller as selected? (To make you feel better, open the BBC News home page and try it there – bad eh?)

With the same home page open, place the mouse over one of your images. If the image is used for more than artistic license and conveys information, does an alternative description appear?

What about those fancy dropdown menus you have. Put your mouse away. Can you use the keyboard to get to the dropdown menu options?

If you answered no to any of the above then your home page breaks the basic rules of accessibility and you have work to do. If you paid to have your site developed, then your web development team have work to do!

Remember the “click here” comment I made earlier? Users who are either partially sighted or totally blind sometimes use assisted technologies such as a screen reader. This is an application that literally “reads” the contents of the screen. One of the functions of a screen reading application is to build a list of available hyperlinks…..do you see where this is going? If you have a liberal sprinkling of “click here” dotted around your web page, the screen reader will present a nice list of “click here”s. The user will have no idea of what the link is about or where it is going. What kind of impression will the user have of your site? Was that a potential customer turned away because your site was not accessible to them?

This list is taken from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) home page and considers the user who may be viewing your site;

• They may not be able to see, hear, move, or may not be able to process some types of information easily or at all.
• They may have difficulty reading or comprehending text.
• They may not have or be able to use a keyboard or mouse.
• They may have a text-only screen, a small screen, or a slow Internet connection.
• They may not speak or understand fluently the language in which the document is written.
• They may be in a situation where their eyes, ears, or hands are busy or interfered with (e.g., driving to work, working in a loud environment, etc.).
• They may have an early version of a browser, a different browser entirely, a voice browser, or a different operating system.

So you see accessibility affects us all. Do you have a slow machine and an old browser? Do you test all of your web pages on all types of browser? Internet Explorer may be the most used (not necessarily the most popular!) browser in the world, but there are many other browsers being used.

So how do you make sure your website is accessible? Follow some (not so) simple guidelines.

Web Accessibility Guidelines

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have produced a series of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines have been broken down into a set of 67 prioritised checkpoints. There are three priority levels;

[Priority 1]

A Web content developer must satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use Web documents.

[Priority 2]

A Web content developer should satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will remove significant barriers to accessing Web documents.

[Priority 3]

A Web content developer may address this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it somewhat difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will improve access to Web documents.

There are three levels of conformance (along with three fancy logos that you can put on your pages);

Conformance Level "A": all Priority 1 checkpoints are satisfied

Conformance Level "Double-A": all Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints are satisfied

Conformance Level "Triple-A": all Priority 1, 2, and 3 checkpoints are satisfied

We cannot not look at these checkpoints in detail here as it would end up far too long! However, you should be aware that they exist.

Ok, you’ve read this article, looked at the links, but you’re still not convinced. Let’s look at accessibility from another angle. You are a business and you need customers to survive.

There are over 8 million disabled users in the United Kingdom, that’s a lot of potential customers that you could be turning away! Not forgetting all those users who haven’t got the same technology you have. Not everyone has the budget to upgrade their machines and you would be surprised at the number of Windows 3.1 users there are out there.

The most common button used by surfers is the “back” button. If they can’t use your site, it’s the button they will hit. They didn’t even get through the door.

There are so many reasons to make your site accessible. Its good business and that, after all, is why we are here.

Article kindly provided by Evolution UK
Mention "Bytestart" and save 10% when Evolution UK conduct a web accessibility report on your website.

Posted December 7, 2005