Web Access Centre Blog

Click, the BBC’s flagship technology program, took a look at how easy (or not!) it is to access the internet if you have a disability.

Listen to Click on the BBC website

RNIB’s Digital Policy Development Manager Julie Howell, Technical Author of PAS 78 “A Guide to Commissioning Accessible Websites”, was interviewed for the piece. Pas 78 came about after a formal investigation into the accessibility of UK websites was published by the Disability Rights Commission in April 2004.

The formal investigation found that 81% of UK websites failed the minimum accessibility standard set by the Web Accessibility Initiative’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Fairly depressing. However the report did flag that if a site is made accessible it becomes 34% quicker for everybody to use. PAS 78 builds on this and emphasis the importance of including users with disabilities in user testing.

JK Rowling’s Flash based website was also featured in the piece. The site, built by Lightmaker who worked together with the RNIB’s Web Access Team, RNID and Macromedia (now Adobe) pushed the boundaries of accessible Flash websites proving that visual, creative, cutting edge design need not be compromised by accessibility. Read our JK Rowling case study to find out how the site uses captioning for the hearing impaired, a sound glossary for the visually impaired, and tab ordering techniques to ensure everybody can enjoy the site.

It is a legal requirement to make your website accessible in the UK just as it is in the States where a blind student, supported by National Federation of the Blind, is taking the US website Target to court (read more about the Target case here).

But there is a carrot to the stick. The business case for making your website accessible is very strong. An accessible website will be easier for everybody to use, more profitable, loved by search engines and future proofed in new and emerging technologies such as mobile phones and PDA’s. So everybody is happy!

There have been warnings galore over the past couple of years (including some from Microsoft themselves) of how badly websites are likely to cope when viewed in IE7. This being because it’s more standards compliant than previous versions, and also because Microsoft have said they have not designed IE7 to be particularly backwards compatible with quirks and non-standards compliant features of earlier version of Internet Explorer.

So I was interested to see a link to an informal check carried out by Etre (the company that does the eye-tracking stuff I mentioned seeing in one of the presentations at that Online Public Services conference I chaired a few weeks back). They checked the home pages of the websites of the FTSE-100 companies in IE6 and IE7, to see how many fell apart in IE7.

IE7: Were they ready?

And did they find the web in meltdown? Well, no, not really. 87 of the 100 sites displayed and functioned identically in the two versions of IE, and in the 13 others, the differences were pretty small.

Now they say themselves that this was far from a truly scientific survey, and they looked just at the front page of each site. It’s quite possible that horrors lurk below the surface of some of these sites, but given the lack of standards compliance that one tends to find on these corporate sites, it may be that the release of IE7 won’t cause quite such a mess on the web as some feared.

Mind you - if you do find any sites which work in IE6 but fall apart in a serious way in IE7, do post the details here so we can all take a look. :)

As you might have noticed we have been struggling with high volumes of comment spam that hasn’t been picked up by the spam filter. We’d like to offer our sincere apologies for this and let you know that we hope to have the problem solved very soon.

The most unfortunate consequence of having to manually delete up to 300 unwanted comments a day, is that we do seem to have deleted one or two real comments.

All your comments are highly valued by us and extremely valuable to the body of knowledge being built in the WACblog, so please, if you notice that yours has been deleted, do resubmit it if you can. In addition, if you noticed that a comment from someone you know has disappeared, please contact them and refer them to this post.

Many thanks for your understanding over this, we will be spam free again soon.

Well goodness me! I’ve been invited to chair this conference next week. Unfortunately I can’t manage the first day (Tuesday 10th October) as I’m already committed to doing something else that day, but I’ve accepted the invitation to chair the second day. Should be interesting! The conference is being run by the Ark Group, and takes place in London. Shame they didn’t think to invite me to participate in the Accessible Websites conference they’re running in Singapore on those days. Heh! Oh well, maybe next year. :)

A prime suspect in the crime of allowing “too much accessibility” has to be the TABINDEX attribute.

How many web authors realise that if you give the TABINDEX attribute to just a few form fields or links on a web page, you could ruin the logical tab order for the entire page? I’m afraid the answer is: far too few.

To be frank, I’ve rarely seen the TABINDEX attribute applied without it creating more problems than it solves.

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I’m very much looking forward to speaking at Tourism for All tomorrow about “Website accessibility: making your website work for your customers and your business”. I’ll be looking at how making your website accessible to all fulfils not only your legal and moral commitments but also boosts your customer reach and return on investment regardless of whether you are a small, medium or large business.

The day will bring together tourism providers from private and public sector organisations, and provide a platform to inspirational advice and successful case studies. The event aims to give every person new information and ideas on how to integrate activities.

I spent a really interesting week on a Roadshow with Business Link Northumbria last year and am looking forward to catching up with a few familiar faces as well as taking a peek in the Sage Gateshead, a unique centre for live music and the arts designed by Norman Foster, where the conference is being held at.

I guess it was bound to happen one day. Today, Julie announced publicly that she will be leaving RNIB in November.

“Where’s she going?!” do I hear you say? She’s off to web design company Fortune Cookie, as Director of Public Relations. Here’s the meat of the press release put out by Fortune Cookie today:

RNIB Accessibility Champion Moves to Fortune Cookie

The Royal National Institute of the Blind’s accessibility champion Julie Howell has announced her move to web design agency Fortune Cookie.

The appointment reflects a major strategic step to place the wider business benefits of accessibility at the heart of Fortune Cookie’s operations.

Howell, who worked for RNIB for 12 years, is best known for raising awareness in the public and private sectors of web accessibility and the rights of disabled customers to use websites. She is Technical Author of the Disability Rights Commission and British Standards Institution’s recently published guidance on commissioning accessible websites (PAS 78).

Speaking about her move, Howell says, “At RNIB I have been able to move accessibility higher up the agenda of many organisations. At Fortune Cookie I will be directly involved in helping businesses and government agencies to make their websites accessible. I will gain an even better understanding of how accessible design can enhance return on investment and attract more customers.

“Fortune Cookie has achieved RNIB’s coveted ‘See it Right’ accessible website status for more of its clients than any other design agency. Together we shall continue to help Fortune Cookie’s clients reach larger proportions of their target audiences through accessible, usable web design.”

Fortune Cookie’s Managing Director, Justin Cooke, says, “This appointment is one of the most exciting we have made in Fortune Cookie’s nine year history. To date we have worked hard to prove that gorgeous-looking, usable, accessible websites deliver a return on investment. Now we must broaden the issue of accessibility so that it appeals and is relevant to the biggest brands in the world. There is no-one in the UK more capable of achieving this than Julie Howell.”

What’s interesting from our perspective in the Web Access team is that we already work a lot with the Fortune Cookie people on various websites they develop and maintain, like the Legal & General website which produced the startlingly good statistics reported by them at the launch of the PAS 78.