August's Column By New Media Age Editor Mike Nutley
Web site accessibility is back in the news this month. At the beginning of July NMA revealed that the Royal National Institute for the Blind was bringing the UK's first cases under the Disability Discrimination Act against companies failing to make their sites accessible to people with visual impairments.
Details of the cases still haven't been released, but the move is a watershed in the development of online services in this country. Then last week the Government signalled its intention to crack down on poor usability and accessibility with the publication by The Cabinet Office of a set of usability guidelines for all government departments. And all of this takes place against a background of the European Year of the Disabled, and an investigation announced in April by the Disability Rights Commission into the accessibility of 1,000 UK sites.
With all this activity, you might think that accessibility would be high on people's agendas, both suppliers and clients. But at a recent agency presentation given by RNIB digital development officer Julie Howell, a client turned to me and asked "Is this stuff important?". The obvious answer is yes, because you can be sued under the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) if, as a provider of services, you discriminate against a disabled person. But what the RNIB and other disability charities are keen promote is the business carrot rather than the legal stick, pointing out the size of the disabled market, and therefore the number of potential customers you're ignoring if you don't make your site accessible.
What's interesting here is that the size of this market is clouded by the very use of the word disabled. People who are colour-blind, for example, rarely think of themselves as disabled, but the wrong choice of colours on a site can make it impossible for them to use. Similarly the deterioration of eyesight that comes with age can make Web sites that don't allow the user to scale the text impenetrable to many older people who wouldn't consider themselves disabled. Ten years ago I worked on a construction industry magazine, and I was invited to the press launch of a report into housing design. The point of the report was that such everyday matters as the placement of electrical sockets, the width of doors and the height of worktops meant that the bulk of UK housing was designed for able-bodied men under the age of sixty and about six feet tall; a minority of the UK population.
Web site accessibility highlights the same issue, and there are a number of examples emerging of companies reaping the benefits of improved accessibility. Macromedia's response to the criticism of Flash by usability and accessibility experts has been to embed best usability practice into the latest version, so far example every image is required by the software to have an alt.text tag identifying it. Still there's a feeling that Web designers are reluctant to embrace accessibility guidelines, believing that their creativity will be stifled and their sites will all look the same. Sadly for anyone who believes this, their thinking is out of date. Good design is about working within parameters and since 1999 those parameters have included the DDA. As Ken Muir, integrated creative director at JWT asked in a recent issue of NMA, ever heard a postage stamp designer complaining that stamps are too small?
Michael Nutley, Editor, New Media Age, http://www.nma.co.uk/