Accessibility (web site accessibility in Ireland)

It is quite likely you have heard the term in relation to your website already, and without a doubt you will hear it more and more, particularly if your website is not accessible. At this point you may be wondering what exactly it is and whether and why you may need it. Is it just the latest buzzword to be generated by the web industry, another clever way for the technically minded to part you from your money?

What is Accessibility?

You won’t be surprised to hear that Accessibility is about making your website accessible - as accessible as possible to as many devices, and thus people, as possible. What you might be surprised to learn is that your website isn’t already accessible.

“Surely if my website is on the internet and someone has a browser, then it’s accessible…”
Well, the answer is yes and no. To make an obvious analogy, you may have the equivalent of a shop on the high street with a severely high step up to the door, making it difficult for disabled access. In fact, you may be one of many who have a step so high that only those with legs of a certain length can enter easily.

Accessibility is best practice

There is a simple answer to the question ‘what is Accessibility?’ - it is best practice in web design, and the reason you may have that prohibitive ‘high step’ is that very few people have been designing with best practice principles in mind. The following is an excerpt from the Department of the Taoiseach’s Recommended Guidelines for Public Sector Organisations:

“The key principle underlining accessibility is that websites should be easy for everyone to use, including people with a disability. Websites should be designed in accordance with universal design principles which makes it easy to locate and access information on the net. Sites which are well designed will meet the needs of all users and therefore, will not have to be especially adapted for the elderly and those with a disability.”

Why isn’t my site Accessible?

Incorrect use of technology

Designers of websites have been making use of the resources available to them to make creative and interesting site layouts and features, even if this meant incorrect uses of the markup language used to create websites. For example Tables, implemented originally for display of data on the web have become a design mechanism used for layout. This is an incorrect use of the technology, but one that became prevalent in the absence of another method to layout websites. However, this makes life extremely difficult for certain screen readers which are used instead of web-browsers by the visually impaired. The screen reader will expect data to be held in tabular form within a table, and therefore when it encounters a table used for layout it can end up making nonsense of the page.

Problems with web browsers

As browser manafacturers battled to dominate the market, often the W3C standards were supported poorly with browsers opting for proprietry features instead to attract users. Each browser would interpret ‘standard’ code differently which meant browsers which did not render HTML pages (web pages) as they should. Designers had to come up with workarounds to tackle these issues and bugs and sometimes would go as far as to decide to design with the most common web-browser in mind and ignore any and all other web-browsers. Because the most common web-browser might consist of nearly 80% of browsers at times, this was seen as acceptable practice, even though coupled with a non adherence to any web standards it made sites very difficult to browse for some people.

Bad habits

The above are two reasons that your site may not be accessible. There are a host of reasons why your site might not be accessible, many of them bad habits that have prevailed in web design for various reasons (some valid, some not so valid) making accessibility to websites difficult. Alt tags are a simple example, the abuse and misuse of Alt tags is widespread despite the relative simplicity of implementing them correctly. Unnecessary use of JavaScript is another bad habit that contributes to inaccessible websites – the bells and whistles syndrome. Moving text for example, often implemented for no good reason can detract from the usability of a page, not just for the disabled but for standard browsers also.

And it’s not just the disabled who may be having trouble accessing your site, there are browser types in use, such as text-only browsers or browsers without JavaScript that may be having as much difficulty as screen readers and other devices. The move is on to combat these bad habits and set the web back on the straight and narrow, after all, the main function of the web is the dissemination of information and for that to work the information has to be attainable or accessible – and not just by those privileged enough to use the browser your site favours.

How do I achieve Accessibility?

There are a set of web standards, as set out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which if adhered to set you well on your way to having an accessible website. Web browsers have begun making a concerted effort to adhere to the correct display of web standard code, plus we now have Cascading Style Sheets with which to handle layout thus relieving us of the necessity to use tables inappropriately. The W3C also launched the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) which outlined Accessibility guidelines which have become the industry standard and the National Disability Authority here in Ireland have published IT Accessibility Guidelines - 2002 which are based on the standards, the standards are split into three groupings which are prioritized, Priority 1, Priority 2 and Priority 3.

Do I need to redesign my site to make it Accessible?

There is always the possibility that your website is already Accessible, although a detailed accessibility study of over 159 separate web sites operated by Irish organisations, spanning a wide range of activities, information, and services, was conducted in the Summer of 2002 by Research Institute for Networks and Communications Engineering (RINCE) at DCU. According to the study 90% of the sites failed generic HTML standards, 94% failed priority 1 accessiblity standards and 100% failed priority 2.

How do I find out if my site is Accessible?

If you are wondering if your site is accessible you could, as a first step, run your site through Bobby, a tool which highlights some common Accessibility problems on sites. The tool requires human intervention for a complete test though so it should only be used as a guide if you are not familiar with the standards and guidelines. 9mmfilm.com can help you complete a full analysis of your site if you so wish.

Am I required to have an Accessible website?

Apart from the obvious benefits of having your online information available to the widest possible audience, there are certain other considerations to take into account. If you are in the public sector then the European Union’s eEurope 2002 action plan will apply to your site. It deals with bringing the benefits of the Information Society to all Europeans, recommends the adoption of Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines and states:

“Public sector web sites and their content in Member States and in the European Institutions must be designed to be accessible to ensure that citizens with disabilities can access information and take full advantage of the potential for e-government.”

The Irish government plans to introduce a Disabilities bill in the near future which is expected to cover accessibility in Information and Communication Technology. Similar legislation in other countries (notably the US and Australia) has resulted in legal action being taken against website owners who have not complied, and not just in the public sector.

The Economic and Social Committee, in their Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions on eEurope 2002: Accessibility of Public Web Sites and their Content stated that local and regional public websites should comply with the WAI Guidelines and that organisations receiving public funding from the European institutions or the Member States should be encouraged to make their Web sites accessible. They also stated that there should be a major initiative devoted to achieving overall accessibility of both public and private Web sites during the year 2003, the European Year of Disabled People.

What will it cost to achieve accessibility?

If accessibility is taken into account at the beginning of the project the cost is not generally substantially more than a project which does not include accessibility – as noted by the Economic and Social Committee:

“In many Member States the objection has been raised that the process of implementation of the WAI guidelines will constitute an excessive financial engagement. This assumption is simply wrong, because implementing the accessibility guidelines is just at the beginning a little more expensive than not implementing them.”

Problems regarding cost are much more likely to arise if accessibility is not taken into account day one, as retro-fitting accessibility is not necessarily an easy task and an entirely new design is often needed.

9mmfilm.com

We hope this has been a useful introduction to Accessibility for you, if you would like to discuss any queries you have on Accessibility with us please do not hesitate to contact me. We would be delighted to help you understand more fully the implications of Accessibility for your organisation.

If your site is not Accessible perhaps you should consider the benefits of an Accessible website for your organisation. As an experiment, it might be worth downloading a popular text-only browser, such as Lynx to see how your website fares in just one of the many alternative user agents that may be trying to view your site.

If you are thinking of designing or redesigning a site, now would be a good time to consider Accessibility. With our experience we can help you assess the best route for your organisation and implement an Accessible website for you.