More and more businesses and public organisations in the UK are realising that having an accessible website is a benefit, and a competitive edge. Its common sense to realise that given the option between a website that works and a website that doesn’t, the working website will be the one that has a better chance of making a sale.
With this perspective, its not all that surprising that the number of accessible website announcements is rising rapidly. Almost every week, another government agency announces a new site that is more accessible and more usable, meets both the W3C accessibility guidelines and the UK eGIF standard. League tables, from organisations like Nomensa, are creating a competitive atmosphere geared toward more accessible websites.
May 2005 was a good month for the public announcement of accessible websites. Lancaster and Stockport councils are the latest to publically acknowledge accessible websites, catching up to East Sussex’s recent ‘RNIB See It Right’ accreditation.
Travel agencies, and publishing companies are commissioning accessible websites from web design agencies - and trumpting the fact in online media circles. Even two legal firms in Scotland are wrangling over the right to call themselves the first UK law firm to have an accessible website.
Its not the threat of legal action that’s behind these positive steps. The Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 has been in force since 1999 - along with the threat of legal action. No public legal challenge has been mounted so far. The drivers behind this surge is perhaps the active encouragement of accessibility-focused organisations, particularly the DRC and the RNIB. I wouldn’t rule out the gold at the end of the rainbow - gaining access to a new £50 billion a year market.
Its a refreshing sight, and one that benefits all people using the web.
So says trimby
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Added June 9, 2005 at 9:39 pm
So says Dan
It’s great to see acknowledgement of the importance of accessible design, but there’s a danger that Nomensa, SiteMorse and their ilk are driving government sites towards reliance and concentration on automated testing.
Both the council sites you mention are using table layouts (why-oh-why?), not necessarily a show-stopper but almost certainly not as accessible as a well-structured site using semantic (X)HTML and CSS. But no automated tool will pick this up, and will test blindly against the few guidelines which can be machine-checked.
Stockport claims AAA compliance, yet every page on their site specifies ‘leftmargin’, ‘topmargin’ etc on the body element, along with much other proprietary or bad markup. These false claims damage the good work done by those who *really* strive to adhere to the guidelines.
So yes, good to see accessibility acknowledged, but acknowledgement does not equate to understanding or commitment, so we shouldn’t be too effusive with our praise - there’s still a long way to go IMHO.
Added June 11, 2005 at 9:36 am
So says Mike Davies
Dan, Quite true, too many people think that automated testing is enough. Its a good place to start, but only a foundation - like a spell checker, or grammar checker. Accessibility is a lot more than that.
Tables for layouts are not necessarily inaccessible - even nested tables for layout are not inaccessible unless they are done in such a way as to visually suggest a relationship that is critical. Screen readers, on default settings, tend to ignore markup that tends to be misused - so the table markup is completely transparent to them until tables reading/navigation mode is selected.
Claiming AAA compliance does damage when the site clearly doesn’t meet those targets. Its clear these types of organisations are going for press coverage over technical proficiency. We do need to be wary of such - and thanks for pointing this particular one out.
Yes, we do have a long way to go. But we shouldn’t without praise until that goal is reached. Praise where we can will encourage others to try it out.
Thanks for the excellent comments.
Added June 12, 2005 at 1:10 pm