Why Accessible Web Design is important for Business
Author:
Pat Byrne
What is Accessible Web Design?
On the web you cannot predict, with any certainty, how the end user will view your web pages. Accessible website design therefore is about designing for diversity; diversity of hardware, browser software and end-user needs.
An accessible web site:
Will work on a variety of different web browsers and hardware platforms (both old and new). For example, the content of the site will be available to someone viewing with WebTV, and to someone with a 21" screen using the latest Windows PC.
Will be flexible enough to accommodate the access needs of the end user - for example, a user with a visual impairment may need to make the text larger or change the colours on the page.
Why is web accessibility important for businesses?
Accessible web design is important for businesses in terms of :
Legal issues, ethical issues and commercial considerations.
Legislation:
Businesses are required, by law, to ensure that their websites are accessible. In the UK laws relating to web accessibility are included within the Disability Discrimination Act, 1999, which makes it clear that information services online should be accessible to disabled people. Whilst there has been no court action in this country, to date, there have been high profile cases in other countries and reports suggest that the Disability Rights Commission intend to begin a formal investigation of companies providing online services.
Newmediazero - 5th February, 2003.
Although, the DRC prefer to emphasize the role they will play in working with organizations to assist them to achieve web accessibility:
Formal Investigation will be conducted in collaboration with a team from the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design at City University London, led by Professor Helen Petrie.
Regarding the announcement of the Formal Investigation Bert Massie, Chairman of the DRC, said:
The DRC wants to see a society where all disabled people can participate fully as equal citizens and this formal investigation into web accessibility is an important step towards that goal
He continued:
Organisations which offer goods and services on the web already have a legal duty to make their sites accessible. The DRC is committed to enforcing these obligations but it is also determined to help site owners and developers tackle the barriers to inclusive web design.
Disability Rights Commission, Newsroom
Ethics
Image is of major importance to successful commerce and it makes good business sense for organizations to demonstrate an inclusive approach. Court action on the grounds of discriminatory practice could prove damaging to public relations.
Commerce
There are many economic benefits associated with accessible web site design.
Marketing:
Web sites that are designed to be accessible can maximize the number of potential visitors (online customers) visiting your site.
The Disability Rights Commission point out that:
Disabled people in Scotland have a combined spending power of £3.6 billion, yet they still have difficulties gaining access to goods and services even though 80% of businesses that responded to a recent survey said that they thought having more disabled people using their services would have a positive impact on profits.
Disability Rights Commission - Information and Legislation
Another recent report "Inclusive Design" points specifically to problems arising from the failure to design for inclusiveness.. The importance of flexible design which does not present barriers to access for disabled people has been highlighted in a recent report by the Disability Rights Commission. In Britain there are 8.5 million disabled people with a combined spending power of £40 billion and there people aged over 50, who are more likely to suffer from impairments, have a combined annual income in excess of £160. Yet inclusive design - the idea of reaching this vast market by designing products 'as easy to use as possible for as many people as possible - is still not considered worthwhile by most designers.'
Inclusive design is the concept underpinning accessible website design and furthermore figures will significantly increase for companies operating within a global framework of economic activity.
Disability Rights Commission - News Release 011308
There are further economic benefits to be gained by ensuring that websites are accessible these include greater customer satisfaction and loyalty by all customers as accessible websites are more usable for everyone.
Accessible Websites not only reach a wider audience but they are easier to find by robots and spiders compiling information for search engines. Sites, which are designed to be accessible benefit businesses as accessible sites better chance of achieving a high position on search engines and directories.
It also means less money spent on site maintenance and the production of new websites. Accessible websites are 'future proof' and can be accessed by new technological devices.
Businesses could find that funding applications are unsuccessful if they do not meet the criteria of funding bodies. For example - in the European Year of Disabled 2003 the European Commission may be more inclined to consider funding organizations with aims relating to web accessibility as laid out in The E-European Strategy.
How to achieve web accessibility
In the legal sense you have achieved accessibility if your site is not deemed to discriminate against a user on the basis of their impairment. This is likely to be determined both by how your site 'measures up' when judged against the W3c Web accessibility guidelines (the de-facto standard), and by the 'reasonable adjustments' DDA you have made to ensure you are not discriminating against any visitors to your site. Those reasonable adjustments will be the steps you have taken to make your site accessible.
Although you could take a 'rules based' approach and try to ensure that your site meets each of the guidelines and checkpoints to be found within the W3c document, a more productive approach is to buy into the principle that your site should be accessible to the widest possible audience, and then use the rules and guidelines to support that principle.
Website accessibility is an on-going process not a one-off activity. Develop a plan including the following:
- Decide on the standards you will use to measure your site against.
- Audit existing web pages to find out how accessible they are, and how much work needs to be done.
- Start by make the most popular pages accessible.
- Ensure that all new pages are designed to be accessible.
- If doing the work in-house, ensuring you have Design and content management tools that help design and maintain accessible sites.
- Test pages using auditing tools such as Bobby, different browsers, hardware platforms (at least both Mac and PC).
- Budget for training to develop expertise within your organization ? even the auditing tools such as Bobby are only useful if the results can be interpreted by someone with experience and expertise in the area of accessible web design.
If you do not already have a website:
- If you will be outsourcing your site to a web design company, ensure that the company you choose has accessible web design expertise- ask if they can give you examples of accessible sites they have designed.
<LI>If you are designing the website in-house, budget for web accessibility training for web designers, and content managers.</li>
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From a technical point of view, the following guidelines will help you to create accessible web pages:
<ul><LI>Build the site using standard markup (HTML or XHTML); this will give the best chance of the site working on the widest range of hardware and software.</li>
<LI>Create flexible web pages by using Cascading Style sheets for presentation.</li>
Guidelines and Standards
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the recognized body regarding web accessibility standards., has designed guidelines to support web accessibility. This organization has produced standards, which create a framework for web designers. They point to three levels of web accessibility.
- Priority 1 - which you must achieve.
<LI>Priority 2 - which you should aim to achieve otherwise a large number of people using the Internet will be denied access to your website.</li>
<LI>Priority 3 - should be aspired towards but current browsers do not altogether support some of these guideline.</li>
The guidelines are based on the use of standard HTML within website design. The present standard is 4.01 - this standard will not change in the future. Thus websites that are designed to this standard will be accessible by new technology - this should cut down on future design costs as such sites will be 'future proof'.
Developing a Web Accessibility Policy
Businesses aiming to achieve web accessibility will have to ensure that once websites are accessible that they are maintained to ensure ongoing accessibility. Organizational Policy will be needed to provide a framework for dealing with this issue - for larger organizations this may mean a major reform of Information and IT Services. Strategic planning to achieve web accessibility will need to be developed to suit the specific needs of individual organizations.
It may involve designing and developing new accessible websites or identifying accessibility problems of existing sites and prioritizing problems. It will mean deciding on the level of accessibility the organization means to achieve and finding out what is needed to accomplish. The approach will depend on the scale of the problem, the size of the business, number of web pages, how these will be maintained and how many staff are responsible for this.
It will involve an accessibility audit of all web pages, which may be carried out internally or externally dependent on skill and knowledge of employees. It will involve staff training, covering areas such as: awareness raising, policy development, accessible website design and maintenance.
Resources
Checking your site for accessibility problems:
There are a number of tools on the market which can be used to check website accessibility and also validate the accessibility of your website:
Web Accessibility and the Law - Martin Sloan is an expert in this field and has published a very informative website on the topic. http://www.web-accessibility.org.uk
Government to get tough over web accessibility - article by Jonathon Webdale. Newmediazero - 5th February, 2003. http://www.nma.co.uk/nmz/story.asp?id=239818
The Making Connections Unit - Jim Byrne, Glasgow Caledonian University. http://www.mcu.org.uk
Accessible Website Design - A Beginner's Guide
http://www.mcu.org.uk/learning/beginner.html
Wave Accessibility Tool http://www.wave.webaim.org:8081/wave/index.jsp
Accessibility Guidelines - WC3 http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10
W3C Markup Validation Service http://validator.w3.org/
Web Tools for Quality, Accessibility, Standards Compliance. Nick Kews Site Valet http://valet.webthing.com/
Pat Byrne, Scotconnect.
http://www.scotconnect.com
March, 2003