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Accessibility Explained

Here at The Accessible Site we ONLY design ACCESSIBLE Sites

Are you wondering if you should invest in making your Web Site accessible?
What if we asked you the following questions:
"Do you want a web site that is inaccessible and hard to use?"
or "Do you want to exclude 20% of your visitors?"
If your answer to either of these questions is NO then you HAVE to invest in Accessibility -
But it might not be as expensive as you may think...

The Web has become a major resource for commerce, employment, entertainment and education.
The more that is published to the Web, the more people are relying on it as their major source of information.
It is your legal and moral responsibility to make your web site accessible to as many people as possible.

Even now, over 12 months since the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 became law, designers and developers continue to churn out Web sites that break this law.

Is it done out of ignorance?
Is it because they don't care?
To save time and therefore money?
So the site is pleasing to the eye?
Because this is what the client wants?

The DDA and subsequent revisions now places the responsibility firmly at the feet of developers and owners equally
i.e. If a developer constructs a web site that doesn't conform to DDA expectations because their client 'wanted it that way' he or she is just as liable under the law as their client.
The site development process should always be an ongoing consultation between a developer and their client.

Only by being accessible to ALL users will a web site reach its full potential audience.

The needs of the following groups of users MUST be considered when designing or re-designing your site:

Blind
Partially sighted
Colour Blind
Deaf
Limited Dexterity
Cognitive or Learning Disabilities
Elderly

By making your site accessible to all the above users you also, by default, improve its USEABILITY and therefore it becomes more accessible to other user groups that will now be able to use your web site because of of improved accessibility.

Laptop Users
Users with slow dial-up connections
Mobile phone WAP users
PDA Users
In-Car Browsers
and many more..

Over 80% of sites do not make any allowances for disabled people, and hence discriminate against them.
At the same time these sites are losing equally valuable traffic from able users that use different technologies.

The Problem

So, what is the problem?
Let us think for a minute about the implications of a site that relies on heavy usage of images or even, no text at all.
Different groups of users would experience different problems with this site -

A blind person relies on a screen reader to read out the text on the screen -
How much information could such a person get from this site if there is no text displayed?

Even for a seeing person there are problems -
If a user has a slow connection (for example a laptop connected via a mobile phone), the images will probably be switched off. How could this person understand anything?

If the images are moving around the screen in the live site -
How could you click on any of these links if you lacked manual dexterity?

If the foreground and background colour contrast is not strong -
How would you get into the site if you had severe colour blindness?

If you were partially sighted and could see only a small portion of the screen at a time using a screen magnifier -
How would you click on a link if it was moving around?

There is background music. The sound gives no information -
But if you were deaf, how would you know that you were not missing anything?

The Answer

For each of these disabilities, there is a method of accessing the information.

Total blindness: provided that the information portrayed in images is made available as text (alternative text), then the visitor will be able to use a screen reader to translate the available text into speech

Partial blindness: provided that the fonts defined in style sheets are in relative sizes, then the text size can be enlarged in the browser

Colour blindness: provided that there is a high contrast between text colours and the background, then people with most forms of colour blindness will be able to read the text

Deafness: provided that any sound commentary is described in a text transcript, then deaf people will be able to access the information

Physical limitations affecting ability to use a mouse: provided that alternative keyboard combinations can be used instead of mouse clicks, then most people who lack manual dexterity will be able to navigate around the site.

Cognitive or learning disabilities: provided that the site is of consistent design and uses simple language, then people with dyslexia and short-term memory deficit will be more likely to be able to use your site

A real example

Here is an image of a web site from a screen dump taken in November 2005.
The page consists of approx 65% images, 35% form and other information including copyright.
This is the first page a user will land on and is the portal to the rest of the site.
The page includes a Registration Form, an Enter Button, Images with Text explaining what the site is about and a Logon Area with a Button for returning users. All of the content text on this page is in the images.

This is how the page appears if you were using a screen reader because of poor sight or had all images turned off to reduce page loading times.

No content information can be gained from this page when viewed without the images.

As you can see, the only information to be obtained from this page is a Copyright statement dated 2005 (which in effect is stating that, despite the current legislation, they have designed and published this site with absolutely no regard to the law or disabled users at all!)

This commercial dotCom web site is effectively making itself unavailable to 20% of the 25 million internet users in the UK alone. (there are over 600 Million users worldwide - you do the maths!) (source Computer Industry Almanac).
Even a tiny percentage of those users would pay for the small extra cost incurred in the development of this site if accessibility issues had been addressed at the outset.

More facts and figures

Disability in the UK (Source: Employer's forum on disability)

Approx. 8.5 million disabled people in the UK, 15% of the population, covered by the Disability Discrimination Act
Over 5.2 million people are of working age, representing 18% of the working population
Estimated annual purchasing power of people with disabilities in £40 - £50 billion
With an ageing population, the number of disabled people in the UK is likely to increase

Want To Learn More?

For a deeper understanding of accessibility issues and to enable you to plan, develop and publish a fully accessible web site we have produced an ebook entitled LET US IN !

The ebook includes detailed analysis of each of the 65 W3C guidelines with examples of the HTML coding required to conform to each guideline.
LET US IN ! is available in PDF Accessible Format.
eBook Details (temp link to index)