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accessibility legislation

 to which 

website owners are subject. This is often contained within disability and discrimina-

tion acts. In the UK, the relevant act is the Disability and Discrimination Act (DDA) 

1995. Recent amendments to the DDA makes it unlawful to discriminate against disabled 

people in the way in which a company recruits and employs people, provides services 

or provides education. Providing accessible websites is a requirement of Part II of the 

Disability and Discrimination Act published in 1999 and required by law from 2002. This 

is most important for sites which provide a service; the 2002 code of practice gives this 

example:

An airline company provides a flight reservation and booking service to the public on its 

website. This is a provision of a service and is subject to the Act.

Although there is a moral imperative for accessibility, there is also a business imperative. The 

main arguments in favour of accessibility are:

1 

Number of visually impaired people – in many countries there are millions of visually 

impaired people varying from ‘colour blind’ to partially sighted to blind.

2 

Number of users of less popular browsers or variation in screen display resolution. 

Microsoft Internet Explorer is now the dominant browser, but other browsers have a 

loyal following amongst the visually impaired (for example  screen-  readers and Lynx, a 

 text-  only browser) and early adopters (for example Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Opera). 

If a website does not display well in these browsers, then you may lose these audiences. 

Complete Activity 11.4 to review variation in access rate.

3 

More visitors from natural listings of search engines. Many of the techniques used to make 

sites more usable also assist in search engine optimisation. Clearer navigation, text alterna-

tives for images and site maps can all help improve a site’s position in the search engine 

rankings.

4 

Legal requirements. In many countries it is a legal requirement to make websites 

accessible.

Guidelines for creating accessible websites are produced by the governments of differ-

ent countries and  non-  government organisations such as charities. Internet standards 

organisations such as the World Wide Web Consortium have been active in promoting 

guidelines for web accessibility through its Website Accessibility Initiative (WAI), see 

www.w3.org/WAI

.

There are three different priority levels which it describes as follows:

● 

Priority 1 (Level A). A Web content developer must satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, 

one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document. 

Satisfying this checkpoint is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use Web 

documents.

● 

Priority 2 (Level AA). A Web content developer should satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, 

one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying 

this checkpoint will remove significant barriers to accessing Web documents.