Accessibility for Websites

The Internet has been a liberating force for the disabled people who are equipped to use it. For five million disabled people in the UK, this means they can shop, bank, communicate, without those disabilities restraining them as they may in the physical world &mdash or could, if sufficient sites were designed to include these users.

Accessibility requirements in the UK are enacted in the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). In the USA, where much of the literature and guidance on website accessibility has emerged, the relevant legislation is the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA).

Section 21 of the UK Act came into effect in October 1999 and The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) published the new, revised Code of Practice on rights of access to goods, facilities, services and premises for disabled people in February 2002.

This explains how service providers (in this case, website administrators) must make 'reasonable adjustments' for disabled people, changing any practice or policy which makes it impossible or unreasonably difficult for disabled people to use its services.

w3c aa accessibility

Web Standards for Acessibility

For example, this page conforms to the double-A standard for accessibility.

We are committed to producing accessible websites as a principle of good design. We can also offer advice on changes to existing sites that may be deemed necessary as part of your organisation's policy or the enforcement of the Act.

Blind and partially sighted people use screen readers to scan a page and reproduce it using synthesized speech. However, extra care has to be taken to ensure the page design is not confusing to the screen reader.

And users who can't manipulate a mouse may still be able to use a keyboard. They can navigate around sites using the Tab key, or Access Keys (keyboard shortcuts placed in the code of a web site).