Homepages for The Daily Mail, Amazon, Huffington Post, Match.com and Twitter less accessible than six years ago
Claudia.Cahalane | 16 May 2017A report by the US charity WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind) has found that many of the web's top 100 homepages are becoming increasingly inaccessible.
Examining the homepages of the Daily Mail, Amazon, Huffington Post, Match.com, Twitter and others found a growing number of accessibility errors.
The Daily Mail rose from 22 in 2011 to 59 errors in 2017, Myspace 6 to 76, Huffington Post 9 to 123, Match.com 26 to 43 and Twitter 5 to 71.
Top of the most accessible list was the likes of thepiratebay.org which went from 2 to 0 and Walmart which fell from 29 to 0. Facebook scored well overall but rose from 8 to 14, and Apple rose from 0 to 1 error. Other high scores were Flickr – which fell from 25 to 1, the BBC whose errors dropped from 21 to 2 and Microsoft, which went from 11 errors six years ago to 2 in March 2017 when the report was run.
This Thursday is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a time for web managers, app developers and those in the tech space to look at how easy or hard it is for disabled people to use their product or service.
It's thought that companies are missing out on a large chunk of the £200bn plus valued purple pound – the money available to spend by disabled people and their families – because of their inaccessible services.
Adi Latif, accessibility and usability consultant at AbilityNet works with companies to improve the accessibility of their apps and websites. Commenting on the report he said: “More time and resources are being spent on accessibility but due to the landscape changing constantly more issues come up."
