Is your website still in the dark?

Jo Easingwood (Communications)

It still amazes me that organisations who are involved in providing information, or services, or have contact with people in some form or other (hmmm, mostly all then), still have websites that are not accessible. I come across websites all the time, high profile websites, websites for organisations who say they take access very seriously, that are not accessible.

In the UK, service providers from shops to local authorities, travel companies to charitable organisations have to make reasonable adjustments to their services (in light of the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act D-day of October 2004). This does not stop at physical modifications. Indeed information provision is key. It is reasonable to let people know about your service. It is reasonable to give them as much information as possible so they can make decisions about visiting your park, your library, your shop. And it is reasonable that this can be on your website. Available information. For everyone.

Don’t panic though. In order to make your website more ‘all-user friendly’ it may be just a case of missing ‘alt’ attributes for images (so that visually impaired users can know what the image is of). Or it could be something more in the structure of your site e.g use of frames, lack of colour contrast, navigation only in Flash format and no text alternatives. It could be that your content is a bit long and unwieldy or that abbreviations are not expanded. Basic rules for accessible design.

Making your website accessible doesn’t have to be a mammoth task. It is far more commonplace in design now. Website creation tools have some built-in software for accessibility, and good web designers should set up new sites with it built into their service. For existing sites you can have an accessibility evaluation done. This will let you know what needs to be changed to comply with the Web Accessibility standards. Many web design companies offer this service.

Visually impaired computer users have screen reading software which will read web pages aloud to them. But there are some vital things that must be in place for this service to be coherent. Picture the scene.. you are doing very important work on the evening the christmas tree lighting ceremony is taking place, and you won’t be able to attend the switching on of the lights by Britney Spears (boo!), but you know you can go to the official website and all the information about the event is on there (hoorah!), oh.. and you are blind. So when you get to the website what you could really do with is a wee snippet with the image which says ‘Picture of Britney Spears, looking bemused as she is mistaken for tree fairy and is last seen aloft giant crane’. Without a description what the screen readers will pick up on is tree.jpg, or perhaps nothing at all. Imagine what you will have missed!

But seriously, things must be done. We check that our website is accessible and constantly monitor it to see if there is anything we can do to make it better. We don’t always get it right. The best way to know how your website is meeting user needs is by consulting with them. From a session we did recently we decided to drop the ‘our’ from ‘our services’ as a main link. When using screen reading software it became clear that although the access key began with S for services, having ‘Our’ in front was not useful.

Formal user testing means you can best understand your clients/customers needs, and get it right. Less need for retrofitting. More likely to reach the people you want to get to, a high percentage of people who you could be missing (e.g older people, visually impaired surfers, people with mobility problems).