Imagine you're about to visit a new e-commerce website. When you get there, you find the text is in a minuscule six-point, dark grey font on a black background. In the space where a picture should be, there's one word: "image".
Unlikely? Yes. After all, no website designers would willingly make life difficult for potential users, would they? Yet the experience is all too familiar for thousands of disabled web users.
Yesterday, the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) published a report, The Web: Access and Inclusion for Disabled People, showing that 81% of websites are inaccessible to disabled people. Having spent a year investigating 1,000 websites in different sectors such as government, business and e-commerce, the commission found that fewer than 200 met even the minimum standards of compliance laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium.
The findings are important because any site that is inaccessible to disabled people is breaking the law. The Disability Discrimination Act says that service providers have to make their services available to disabled people. The report recommends that the government promote a kitemark scheme for website commissioners and that website develop ers involve disabled people in the early stages of the design process.
Many disabled people, including those who are blind and partially sighted, are heavy web users. Paresh Jotangia, an information officer, for the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB), says the web "has opened up loads of doors which were closed before". Jotangia, who is blind in one eye and has 10% vision in the other, uses magnification software called ZoomText to read websites. His job requires him to travel across the south-east, and he uses the web to look up maps and train times. "Finding streets on the web has made my life so much easier, rather than trying to struggle with an A to Z or get instructions over the phone." Shopping from a website, he says, is much simpler than trying to find the correct page number or phone number in, say, the Argos catalogue.
Blind and partially sighted people, of whom there are 2 million in the UK, have successfully been using computers for many years, says Julie Howell, digital policy development officer at the RNIB. Completely blind people use screen-reading software that can translate text into speech or to a refreshable braille display. If a graphic has a description attached to it, the screen reader can tell the user what the image is.
Websites became harder to access in the late 1990s, when lots of untrained people began designing sites, says Howell. One particular difficulty was that some designers started inserting pictures without hardcoded descriptions, so a blind person using a screen reader would just hear the word "image" without knowing what the image represented. Others started fixing font size and colours. "For a partially sighted person it's crucial that they're able to set the text to the size they need and change the colours," says Howell.
It is not only blind and partially sighted people who can find websites inaccessible. The use of combined sound and video on a site disadvantages deaf people, unless there is also a text transcript, while people who can't use a mouse (such as those with arthritis) need to be able to navigate the site using a keyboard.
But making a website accessible to all isn't difficult, says Howell. The Web Accessibility Initiative has laid out some simple guidelines for web designers: "By following those guidelines, designers are making sure the greatest number of people are going to be able to read their website."
· For more information about good web design, see www.rnib.org.uk/webaccesscentre
