Crumple Zone - Accessibility

Privacy and Electronic Communications Act 2003 and Web Accessibility

Is Your Website Breaking the Law?

This legislation came into force on 11th December 2003 and part of the act is concerned with web site accessibility for visually impaired and disabled users.

All web sites must make 'reasonable' provision for the different ways in which visually impaired and disabled users access the internet. This must be achieved before 2005.
Guidelines have been laid down by the RNIB and the WC3 web standards body and sites must comply with these in order to be fully accessible and to comply with the law.
Before this legislation, it was up to those who commissioned the site and the designers of the site to decide whether to do the extra work required to make the site accessible, as standard web design software does not do this automatically. As awareness of the need for accessibility is very limited and most web designers are totally unaware of accessibility issues, the vast majority of sites do not comply with the guidelines and therefore would now be considered to be breaking the law.

In many cases, only a few, simple changes are necessary to make a site conform to these guidelines. These can cost from as little as £10 per page. Sometimes however, a site may have to be extensively redesigned, or a parallel, accessible site provided. This is especially the case when a site makes extensive use of Flash or similar techniques. These elements are impossible to render accessible to any useful degree.

The legal aspect is not the only one that should be considered. A commercial site that cannot be accessed by large numbers of users is depriving that business of many potential customers.

Partially sighted, blind and disabled users who cannot use a conventional mouse or keyboard must access the Internet in different ways to most of us.

Partially sighted users must be able to change the size and colour of text and its background for maximum legibility. The way many websites are designed, does not allow for this, making it impossible for this group of users to access them.

Blind users often make use of 'speech browsers'. These attempt to read the information on a web page and use a computerised voice to communicate this information to the user. Page stucture is a key issue in this case and it is necessary to ensure that the contents of the page make sense when read 'linearly' by the speech browser and users are warned of any pop-up windows which could prove confusing. A speech browser can only 'read' information which is represented by text. It cannot 'see' images and explain their meaning to the user unless the page code contains meaningful labels for the pictures. The same goes for text represented by graphics, for a speech browser this text is invisile. Many designers do not bother to label any of their images, therefore much information cannnot be accessed by this group of users. This is especially a problem with navigation buttons. The speech browser cannot read the text on a graphical button. If it is not labelled, the user can have no idea where a particular link will take them.
Sites which make extensive use of Flash or similar for presentation of text and images are totally inaccessible for this group of users. Speech browsers cannot 'read' these elements at all and as far as the user is concerned, the site might as well not be there. For the same reason, use of Adobe PDF documents should be limited or ordinary web page alternatives provided.

Access to sites can also be limited for users who cannot use a conventional mouse or keyboard to navigate web sites. Alternative input devices are often unable to offer the level of control and accuracy that a mouse does and the designer must consider this to allow the site to be navigable. A non-compliant site can be difficult or even impossible to navigate for the disabled user, therefore access can be severely limited or even impossible for this group of users. With a few basic techniques, the designer can ensure that links can be accessed with simple controls making a site fully navigable and therefore accessible. Again, it is impossible to make Flash elements work in this way, so they should be avoided unless absolutely necessary.

Despite all this, the whole of a website does not have to be 100% accessible. The Privacy and Electronic Communications Act only stipulates that 'reasonable' adjustments be made. As far as commercial sites are concerned this means that any information that is presented on a site must be accessible to all users. There are no technical reasons why this should not be and most sites will only need a relatively small work to get them up to scratch. The exceptions to this are 'interactive' elements or sites of 'creative' design companies. Sections which often use Flash, Java or video clips, which would be impossible to present in any other way and play an important part in the site, as for instance, a 3D 'Virtual tour'. However, these elements should be confined to certain sections of the site only, ensuring that the main part of the site can be accessed fully or an accessible alternative provided. This means avoiding site 'intro movies' or similar as users often cannot navigate sites beyond these and so cannot access the main part of the site.

Any new web site comissions we undertake from now on, will be fully compliant with the requirements of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Act 2003

[Contact us] for more details or for a free accessibility audit on your site.