Accessibility News

September 09, 2004

UK Businesses ‘cannot run and cannot hide’ from equal access laws after October 1st

New equal access laws coming into force in October 2004 will have as dramatic an effect on opening up business and services to disabled people in the UK as similar laws have had in the United States, the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) said today.

Speaking today Catherine Casserley, Senior Legislative Advisor for the DRC also predicted a future in Britain of increased assertiveness amongst disabled people no longer willing to tolerate a second class service.

Ms Casserley outlined the steps that the DRC would be taking to ensure compliance with the new duties at a morning press briefing.

In the run up to the October 1st deadline the DRC is investing heavily in projects aimed at making sure that disabled people know about and assert their new rights post October, Ms Casserley said. Increasing the capacity of disabled people and organisations to monitor progress and complain is also a key aim.

Part 3 of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) requires every business, large or small – from the local shop to restaurants, health clubs, dentists and supermarkets – to become more user-friendly to Britain’s 10 million disabled people. The law means that businesses will need to make reasonable changes – such as adapting premises, removing physical barriers or providing the service another way – so that disabled people can use the service. The change will affect over 2 million British businesses. Failure to act could result in legal action.

April 16, 2004

British Library to digitise audio archive to increase accessibility.

A major £1 million pound programme to digitise 12,000 items of sound recordings from the British Library’s Sound Archive, which amounts to nearly 4,000 hours of recordings has been announced, by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

This significant resource will be made freely available to further and higher education and will include a wide range of materials, including classical and popular music, broadcast radio, oral history, and field and location recordings of traditional music.

Examples currently held on the British Library site (http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/nsa.html) include a live recording of Paul Robeson in Othello, Florence Nightingale speaking (one of the earliest sound recordings), and Arthur Conan Doyle talking about the genesis of Sherlock Holmes. These historic recordings will be amongst an enormous wealth of materials available to the project to make available to further and higher education.

The Archival Sound Recordings is a £1m project, made possible through funding from the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE). The overall digitisation programme, being managed by the JISC, represents a total investment of £10m to be applied to delivering high quality content online, including sound, moving pictures, census data and still images for long-term use by the further and higher education communities in the UK.

Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library welcomed the agreement, saying: “Sound recordings represent a massively untapped resource in the field of education. They are relevant to all subjects and we are delighted that this programme will bring wide access to rare, historic and hugely valuable sound resources. This partnership demonstrates the British Library’s commitment to the sector and we are delighted to work with JISC to deliver it.”

Stuart Dempster, JISC Programme Manager said: “This landmark project promises to deliver a wide range of targeted audio content from one of the world’s leading sound archives to the UK education community, some of which will be selected by the education community through an online consultation. It recognises the potential transformative power of audio for use in learning, teaching and research.”

April 14, 2004

Disabled Web Access

A study of 1,000 websites across the UK today revealed not only that most organisations breach guidelines on making sites accessible to disabled users and risk legal action under disability discrimination laws, but that the guidelines themselves may be inadequate.

Since March 2003, the Disability Rights Commission and the Centre for Human Computer Interaction at London's City University have been testing sites in the public and private sectors for technical compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

The DRC is an independent statutory body responsible for advising Government on the effectiveness of disability discrimination legislation. Representing the interests of Britain's 8.6 million disabled, the DRC is empowered by law to conduct formal investigations which meet these aims.

Of the 1,000 sites tested, 808 (81 per cent) failed on automated testing to reach the minimum standard for accessibility, known as Level A. But that does not mean that 19 per cent achieved the minimum standard; in fact, the likely level of accessibility is much worse.

The testing of the full sample involved running commercially-available software against each of the 1,000 sites. Such tests can determine whether, for example, an image on a website is accompanied by an ALT tag - a text alternative that describes the image for the benefit of those using assistive technologies such as screen readers. However, only a manual test can determine if that ALT tag actually makes sense - e.g. an image of a dog might be mislabelled "cat".

Only 100 of the sites tested were subjected to additional manual tests by a disabled user group comprising individuals with dexterity impairments, dyslexia, hearing impairments, blindness or partial sight.

Other than a failure to describe images, the disabled user group found other common problems: cluttered and complex page structures; confusing and disorienting navigation mechanisms; failure to describe images; inappropriate use of colours and poor contrast between content and background.

In total, the disabled user group identified 585 accessibility and usability problems; but nearly half of these (45 per cent) were not violations of any of the WCAG's 65 checkpoints - meaning that they could be present on any website which conformed to WCAG guidelines at any level.

The research found an average of eight instances of the W3C guidelines being violated per home page; but it also found that on average there were 108 potential instances on the typical home page where a disabled person might be disadvantaged in his or her use of a site.

Only two websites out of 1,000 were Level AA compliant (from a total of six that appeared to meet the Level AA standard in the automated tests) and no web site achieved the highest (AAA) level of conformance.

Announcing the findings, the DRC warned that "swathes of businesses may not be complying with existing equal access laws" and that it is "only a matter of time" before they face legal action from disabled consumers.