how to keep your web site legal:
The Disability Discrimination Act (1995)

Much of this Act is already law, however, further aspects come into force in October 2004 which oblige all business to make 'reasonable adjustments' to ensure that their services are accessible to people with disabilities. No doubt there will be much debate about what is 'reasonable' and this will probably be decided by test court cases.

In the meantime, if you are planning a new web site (or updating your existing one) then make sure that it will be accessible.

Some of the issues that you need to watch out for are:

• Home pages that are constructed purely from images or animations and act as barriers to visually impaired users. Even though you can see text on the page it may be 'locked up' within an image if the site hasn't been prepared intelligently.
• 'Drop down' or 'fly out' menu systems that require too much mouse control for users with motor disabilities who prefer to navigate using their keyboards. These may also be invisible to blind users who have special browsers.
• Text that has fixed sizes - users with poor eyesight need to be able to re-size your text using their own browser settings.
• Links from image buttons instead of from text - as mentioned above, users can't re-size text that is 'locked' into an image.
• Low contrast colour schemes or colour combinations that are difficult to read by people with colour blindness.
   

Note that the Electronic Commerce Directive requires you to ensure that the business information on your site must be 'easily, directly and permanently accessible'.

Your options

The ideal solution is to make sure that your site is designed and built without using any of the techniques that may block access to users with disabilities. You can use the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines as a benchmark (see the links on the right).

However, if you have an existing site or if you have a strong business case for using some of these techniques, then you must provide some alternative way for disabled users to access the key information. This could be as simple as repeating a menu at the bottom of the page in plain text or it might mean duplicating most of the web site in 'text only' pages. The latter option will put up your design costs as well as effectively leaving you with two web sites to maintain.

Making your site more accessible can also make it more successful

Most of the techniques that are helpful to disabled users are also search engine friendly. So making your site more accessible will also make it easier to find. As a result you are likely to end up with both more visitors with disabilities and more visitors in total.

I will be writing more about the issues around providing disabled access to your web site in a future article. If you'd like to be notified when the new article is ready, please join our mailing list.

Back to 'keeping your web site legal'

18 July 2003

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