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Web accessibility – a brief introduction
Web accessibility is about ensuring your website can be accessed and is usable by the largest audience possible, regardless of disability or browsing technology.
Economic benefits
An accessible website not only has moral and key technical benefits, but also economic benefits when you consider:
- disabled spending power is in excess of £80 billion*
- the UK population is ageing and there is a vast amount of spending power in the older generation – a generation where there may be minor vision problems developing, reduced dexterity, mobility and hearing impairments
- wealthy young professionals are accessing websites on web-enabled mobile phones, PDAs or other non-traditional browsing devices. This is quite significant when it is projected that by 2009 there will be three billion mobile phone users worldwide
Legal requirements
In addition to the moral, technical and economic benefits of providing accessible websites, it is also a requirement of UK law. Amendments made to the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 states that individuals should not encounter unjustifiable discrimination by goods, facilities and service providers on account of disability. Under this legislation, discrimination may take the form of a denial of service or the provision of a poorer service.
Access for all
An accessible website will mean that access to the information will be greatly enhanced for the following groups of individuals. Those with:
- Physical impairments
- Dyslexia
- Cognitive impairments which affect learning and understanding
- Impaired vision
- Blindness
- Impaired hearing
- Deafness
When you design or modify a website to allow access for people with disabilities you are not only making your website more accessible, you are also increasing the usability for non-disabled users. We can apply this to a real world situation when looking at the lowering of kerbs. These were initially lowered to provide better access for wheelchair users. However, nowadays, they are advantageous for a number of users including cyclists and people pushing prams. The same can be said for web accessibility.
Accessible design principles when applied will benefit everyone. For example, by ensuring all functionality is accessible via the keyboard you are not only reducing barriers for blind users who rely on accessing the website via their keyboard and screen reader, you are enabling the young executive to access the website on their PDA or web-enabled mobile phone which doesn’t have a mouse.
Assistive technology (AT)
By ensuring accessible standards are implemented, it is likely websites will be more compatible with AT used by disabled individuals. These may include alternative input devices such as switches or software such as voice recognition.
AT is a piece of equipment or software product that is used to increase, maintain or assist the functional capabilities of individuals with disabilities. It can be any device or technique that helps people in removing or reducing barriers and enhancing their daily activities. AT include hardware devices such as alternative keyboards and pointing devices, as well as software programs which can offer the user a wide range of functionality from magnifying screen content, predictive text, or even converting what you say into text and commands on the screen via Voice Recognition.
Coming soon…
Meeting the standards of an accessible website requires awareness of the disabilities people have together with how this affects their interaction with computers. Watch out in the coming weeks for our series of articles on “Understanding disability issues when designing a website”.
*Source: http://www.dwp.gov.uk/
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For more information:
- Email accessibility@AbilityNet.org.uk
- Phone 0800 269545
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