Websites 'failing' users with disabilities
from BBC

An investigation by the Disability Rights Commission shows that most websites are unusable by disabled people.

This means that many everyday activities carried out on the internet - booking a holiday, managing a bank account, buying theatre tickets or finding a cheaper credit card - are difficult or impossible for many disabled people.

Bert Massie, DRC Chairman described the situation as "unacceptable", and said the organisation was determined not to allow disabled people to be left behind by technology.

It's an environment that could be made more accommodating at modest expense. A thousand websites were tested for the survey using automated software, and detailed user testing was carried out on 100 sites, including government, business, e-commerce, leisure and web services such as search engines.

The results showed that the worst affected group were those with visual impairments.

Blind people involved in testing websites were unable to perform nearly all of the tasks required of them despite using devices such as screen readers.

"The web has been around for 10 years, yet within this short space of time it has managed to throw up the same hurdles to access and participation by disabled people as the physical world," said Mr Massie.

"It is an environment that could be made more accommodating to disabled people at a relatively modest expense."

Mr Massie warned website owners to improve accessibility or be prepared to face legal action.

Definitely something to keep in mind, and not just because of the threatened legal action. The article goes on to say that:"The problems most commonly encountered by the disabled website testers were cluttered pages, confusing navigation, failure to describe images and poor colour contrast between background and text. I'd say we are guilty of having a cluttered page, not guilty of confusing navigation and lacking alt elements of img tags. As for "poor colour contrast between background and text", take a look at booty vision, and you tell me. XHTML is supposed to make web pages render uniformly, making the job of screen readers like JAWS easier. You can read the rest of the article below.

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The 1995 Disability Discrimination Act requires information providers to make their services accessible.

The problems most commonly encountered by the disabled website testers were cluttered pages, confusing navigation, failure to describe images and poor colour contrast between background and text.

Businesses have a social responsibility as well as a legal duty
Julie Howell, RNIB
Researchers at London's City University, who carried out the study for the DRC, also found that many web developers were unaware of what needed to be done to make sites accessible.

Government should act

Welcoming the report, the Royal National Institute of the Blind said there was a clear need for government to raise awareness of the issue.

"Businesses have a social responsibility as well as a legal duty to ensure that disabled people can use their websites," said Julie Howell, RNIB spokesperson.

The organisation provides advice on how to make websites more user friendly, and is planning a series of events to raise awareness of the needs of disabled web users around the UK.

There are signs that some website owners are getting the accessibility message.

Left-wing magazine, New Statesman, recently announced that it was making its web pages available as speech by using new software called Browsealoud.

The system was developed by Northern Ireland-based Texthelp Systems.

The company hopes that its system will soon be more widely adopted especially by government sites.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/3623407.stm

posted by prof_booty | 02:41 PM