Compliance
Legislation is in force in most developed countries to end discrimination on the grounds of disability. As a web site owner you come under the jurisdiction of such legislation, and you have an obligation to make your web site accessible to all users. Recent surveys across European web sites revealed that in excess of 98% failed to meet even the lowest accessibility standard.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main body responsible for setting Web Design Standards. W3C was founded by, amongst others, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.
Disabilities fall into 4 main categories:
- Visual impairment, which can vary from mild colour blindness to fully blind
- Physical impairment, which may make the use of a mouse or keyboard difficult
- Cognitive impairment, which requires a logical flow of information to be comprehensible
- Aural impairment, making it difficult to hear sounds embedded into a site
The optimum time to build accessibility into a site is at the design stage. However if your site is already up and running we can rework it. It need not be expensive, and it would be wise to beware of scare tactics that may be employed by the less scrupulous to force you into an expensive redesign. If you are concerned that your site may be at risk, please contact us to discuss it. We can quickly advise as to the extent of any problems.
In designing a site, we must therefore consider these factors, and design the site to be accessible by, amongst other things, avoiding use of unnecessary non-contrasting colours, alternative descriptions for all images and multimedia, text navigation aids, use of natural language and a logical layout. On the technical side, the use of style sheets to separate presentation from structure and style from content, will not only facilitate compliance, but will make any future site re-designs much easier, quicker and less expensive.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has laid down standards for accessibility. Sites that do not comply at least to level A of W3C standards for accessibility run the risk of being judged non-compliant under DDA legislation.
To date no actions have been brought against UK web site owners in respect of the legislation, mostly because most have changed their sites when threatened. However, in Australia, the organisers of the Sydney Olympic Games were successfully sued under similar legislation and damages of 20,000 A$ plus costs were awarded against them. The legal costs and the subsequent web development costs ran into millions.
Another consideration is browser compatibility. A considerable number of web sites are designed and tested only in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Whilst IE is still the market leader, Microsoft's market share is falling: over 30% of internet users do not use Internet Explorer, over 10% do not use Windows. It is therefore important that a site works on all platforms.
It could be argued that failing to design for all browsers contravenes the disability discrimination legislation, but at the very least common sense dictates that you would not wish to exclude 30% of the potential audience for your site! Compliance with W3C standards for web design (html and css) will aid compliance with disability discrimination legislation
We test sites under Windows and Linux operating systems, using IE6, IE5.5, Netscape, Opera, Mozilla, Firefox and Konqueror browsers. In addition, we design sites that degrade gracefully, so that much older browsers - which count for less than 1% of users - will still see the content, but may lose some of the layout. Thus your message reaches the maximum audience.
Further information on compatibility issues :
W3C - Worldwide Web Consortium
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