Guess What Accessibility Means
Today I’m going to talk a little about UK legislation and its impact on web accessibility, particularly in relation to users with disabilities. As we examined yesterday, government websites often fail to practise what they preach, but in UK terms the problem is as much that they don’t preach anything! Unlike US government legislation such as Section 508, UK law provides no real guidelines or definitions of what the obligations for accessible web design are.
UK law in regards to accessibility of services is found in the Disability Discrimination Act. Yet there is no specific reference to website accessibility, and no definition of what it means in legal terms. Instead, accessibility issues are rolled into an overall legal requirement to make any service available , a requirement that extends to any company whether public or private sector. Government policies are in place to enforce accessibility for public sector organisations such as local councils, but legally all sites that offer a service to the public need to be accessible.
The lack of definition can be frustrating in that it provides no specific guidelines or conditions to fulfil in order to meet legal obligations. But on the other hand it means that were any legal case to be brought (and no such precedent exists at this time), it is most likely that adherence to the basic WCAG standards would likely be used as a reference point. So presumably the best approach to take is to ensure any website meets basic provision under those conditions. This is generally good practice in any case, but I have pointed out some of the flaws in being wedded to WCAG standards.
Interestingly, under UK law the responsibility for accessibility is not based on any complaint made against a site. It is not good enough to make adjustments after the event of a complaint, UK law is specific that it is a company’s responsibility to anticipate the needs of disabled people. So it’s vital if you’re a company in the UK to ensure that basic standards of accessibility are met. This shouldn’t be a major difficulty, any reasonable designer or design company should be making accessible sites as a matter of course, and certainly accessibility is not something that should be costing extra.
But it’s never quite as easy as all that, is it? I had a quick look at some sites that might be most commonly used by the general public in the UK, looking to travel or to shop. British Airways fail their W3C validation for XHTML 1.0 Transitional, while TheTrainLine and Tesco both have sites which can’t even be correctly tested due to failures in character encoding. Having had a quick glance at the source code for the main portal page for these sites, the most disgraceful one is TheTrainLine, a major portal for booking train tickets throughout the UK. Not only does the character encoding make code validation by W3C impossible, but the site is still designed and laid out with tables. That’s genuinely shocking and they’d have a hard time demonstrating any adherence to even the most basic accessibility standards.
I think that’s probably the biggest weakness in UK legislation to ensure web accessibility at least for the needs of physically or mentally impaired users. While there are legal requirements to be accessible, the lack of definition means no standards for companies to measure their sites against from a legal standpoint. As a result no action is taken. Even basic guidelines and advice, such as Section 508’s specific citing of WCAG, can provide a greater motivation for companies to act to ensure accessibility.
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