Free Accessibility Reports

Since 1999 it has been law for websites to be made accessible. As part of the Disability and Discrimination Act revisions in 2004, small businesses are now exempt. No test case has been made in British law yet but the 2000 Olympic website case has led to UK firms changing their websites anonymously on the basis of accessibility audits.

What happens if my site does not comply?

The worst case scenario for you and your business is that a disabled person can make a claim against you if your website makes it impossible or unreasonably difficult to access information and services. If you have not made reasonable adjustments and cannot show that this failure is justified, then you may be liable under the Disability Discrimination Act, and may have to pay compensation and be ordered by a court to change your site.

What's involved in getting my site accessible?

The answer is different for each site. It may require a minor adjustment and additional features to your web template - it all depends how the site was built in the first place. Quite often it involves the removal of table based designs and moving to a pure stylesheet design and layout. These types of sites are much faster to load. The navigation may need to be changed to make the site easier to navigate for screen reading technology. The size of the text should be controllable by the user, either through tools on the site or by allowing font sizes in the design which can be made larger through a users browser.

An example of an accessible makeover based on the Open Source Joomla! content management system can be found here: ARI Project

Making this site accessible to AA standards eventually involved a redesign of the whole website. Any web design process should build accessibility in from the start so if you are thinking of getting a new template or redesign of your site - make sure you decide upon an accessibility conformance level. You can read more about conformance levels here: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

If you would like a free accessibility report please contact me.