Accessibility is now a common goal for any public facing websites, and is now unlawful for companies to make their site inaccessible to people with disabilities. A number of companies had actions taken against them in response to this. What does this mean to the average designer / developer?
When designing a site, the designer's obligations in terms of accessibility differ slightly depending on the target country for the site. Although a countries disability rights do change slightly depending on where you are, they are for the most part the same. In the UK there is the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), which was set up in 1995 to ensure that people with any disability are not discriminated against, and has since been amended several times. What this means today is that any UK site should be available to any member of the public regardless of their disability, and should not impossible for them to interact with. To better explain legal rights and requirements, the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) was created.
For the purpose of websites, the points are covered under "Providers of service" which covers the provision of goods and services, and has been amended twice so far since its original publication to better reflect the requirements.
...in failing to comply with any duty imposed on him by section 21 in circumstances in which the effect of that failure is to make it impossible or unreasonably difficult for the disabled person to make use of any such service;
...access to and use of information services;
Above are two of the statements that are made which are relevant to web based services, and have show the extent of how the law applies. Also mentioned in section 19 of part 3 is that it is irrelevant whether the service being provided is a paid-for service or not, the same provisions for disabled users should be made - though interestingly enough, they did initially exclude educational establishments from this.
From 1st October 1999 a service provider has to take reasonable steps to change a practice which makes it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to make use of its services
Since 1999 sites providing services that do not make concessions for disabled users are, under this act, breaking the law by treating disabled users differently. This for example, would even include council sites - they are providing information, and in some cases provide services in the form of being able to pay council tax, or submit planning applications for example. If either of these services, or the information itself was inaccessible to for example, a blind user using a screen reader, then they would be in breach of the act.
The aforementioned DRC, in 2004, produced the "Access and Inclusion for Disabled People" report where 1,000 sites were tested against the guideline checkpoints. Some of these checkpoints that do not need human interaction were checked automatically - something that you can do yourself with your own sites using tools such as the T.A.W. extension for Mozilla Firefox. The complete set of guidelines were produced by the W3C and come in 3 levels. Of these levels, the Priority 1 guidelines (see WCAG 1.0 A) must be met, though it is preferred and recommended that a minimum of Priority 2 (see WCAG 1.0 AA) is met. There is also a third level that very few sites comply to.
The Commission's policy is to seek improvement in the first instance through advice and conciliation, and this report contains a range of recommendations to help website owners and developers tackle the barriers to inclusive design. However, where the response is inadequate, we shall be vigorous in the use of our enforcement powers; these range from "named-party" Formal Investigations which can lead to sanctions against the owners of inaccessible websites, to the provision of support for test cases being brought by individual disabled people.
Past the automated testing, they then took 10% of the tested sites for further human testing - some of which may, as the citation suggests, lead to legal action on some sites tested. This 10% was tested by 50 users of various disabilities so that an accurate picture could be given as to what problems may arise from interaction these selected sites. this group included blind, partially sighted, deaf or hard of hearing, dyslexic, and physically impaired such as those inflicted with a motor neuron disease.
