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Real Benefits
If the bigger businesses are going to embrace web accessibility, they’ll need to see clear financial benefits and good returns on their investments. Legal and General’s recent re-design experience provides a solid example of the real business benefits to be gained from developing and accessible web site.
The Legal and General site was re-designed in 2005, with a view to increasing it’s overall accessibility levels following some concern about the old site’s potential for litigation under the UK Disability Discrimination Act. One year following the site’s relaunch, the following ‘indirect’ benefits were noted:
Quick Web Accessibility Tips
The following “Quick Tips” summarise some of the key concepts of accessible Web design.
These are not complete guidelines, but should be viewed as “quick ‘n’ dirty” tests for some of the checkpoints from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0.
WCAG 1.0 supporting documents include a simplified Checklist and a detailed document describing techniques for implementing the Guidelines that includes references to both HTML techniques and CSS techniques. There is also a multimedia curriculum presentation which explains how to use the guidelines but it should be noted that this presentation is dated March 2000 and, consequently, maybe be somewhat outdated in regard to current browser technology.
The Case For Web Accessibility
There are many reasons why it is important to consider, not only how your web site resources operate, but also how easily they can be accessed by those with a disability.
The Legal Case
Firstly there is the legal responsibility embodied in the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (’the Act’) that places a responsibility upon providers to ensure that disabled individuals have effective access to services and information.
Is Your Web Site Accessible?
Accessibility, in its broadest sense, means providing the flexibility to accommodate individual service user’s needs and preferences. In an IT context, accessibility refers to adapting computer technology to make it usefully available to more people than would otherwise be the case.
Web accessibility is specifically aimed at opening up resources on the World Wide Web to allow for the participation of people with disabilities.
