UK Accessible Web Design & Consultancy

Accessibility, Standards Compliance and your Business

Isn't it time your business website was accessible and standards compliant?

Did you know that:

• One in five adults is disabled. Their spending power is around £40 billion per year, yet many of them have difficulty accessing goods and services.
• You already have duties under the DDA - for example, you cannot refuse to serve a disabled person or provide a lower standard of service because of their disability unless this can be justified, and you may be under a duty to make reasonable adjustments to the way in which you provide your services.

Under section 19 of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 [5] it states:

It is unlawful for a provider of services to discriminate against a disabled person:

• in refusing to provide, or deliberately not providing, to the disabled person any service which he provides, or is prepared to provide, to members of the public;
• in failing to comply with any duty imposed on him by section 21 in circumstances in which the effect of that failure is to make it impossible or unreasonably difficult for the disabled person to make use of any such service;
• in the standard of service which he provides to the disabled person or the manner in which he provides it to him; or
• in the terms on which he provides a service to the disabled person.

In summary, what this means is that a disabled person could sue or claim compensation from you if they have difficulty using your website.

Business Benefits

Looking beyond any legal or moral issues, did you know that an accessible website can actually benefit your business in many ways too?

If your website takes into consideration the needs of disabled people then you are massively increasing your potential audience, some of whom may suffer only mild disabilities such as poor sight, colour blindness and arthritis but can be excluded from your website because of poor design just as much as people with more severe disabilities.

The Disability Rights Commission tell us:

“There are 8.5 million disabled people in Britain with a combined annual spending power of £40 billion. People aged over 50 have a combined annual income in excess of £160 billion. Yet, inclusive design - the idea of reaching this vast market by making products as easy to use as possible for as many people as possible - is still not considered worthwhile by most designers, manufacturers and engineers”.

It is therefore sensible to assume that including these people in your website strategy will massively increase your potential market.

Another way of increasing your audience is to optimise your website for search engine placement, and guess what?
An accessible website can usually be read much more easily by the search engines and can be designed in such a way that all the content appears in a logical, linear fashion to the search engine spider. This is important because most search engines only index the first few paragraphs of text on the page which can easily consist of navigation links and other inapropriate text when designed in other ways.

So not only do you benefit from including disabled users in your visitors but you are much more likely to gain a higher ranking in the search engines, therefore increasing your audience once again!

 

For more information email us here [6]