This International Disability Awareness Day, DPA Ambassador Chris Winter FBCS CITP FIET tells us why accessibility of websites is still locking disabled people into digital poverty.
Internet enabled online Digital Services are one of the best things to have happened for many of the UK’s disabled people. According to the DWP there are over 14 million registered people in the UK. However, 96.8% of the world’s top one million web homepages are known to have Digital Accessibility errors. This figure is based on automatically evaluating the homepages of the top 1 million global websites against the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. Tellingly, these guidelines have been around for over 20 years.
The most prolific of these errors is poor contrast that impacts many people with visual impairment and images without a descriptive text that confuse assistive screen reader technologies on which people with a variety of disabilities depend. These errors can significantly impact the usability of websites by people with disabilities and lead to the exclusion of many. Exclusion is both a social challenge and a commercial one as it excludes disabled people from websites – whether accessing essential services or shopping.
The WebAIM numbers and those of my own personal research places the UK in a similarly bad state. There are, however, a few UK organisations that do realise the importance of good digital accessibility. In the barren landscape of accessible UK news and media websites, the BBC and the Telegraph are all too rare examples of good digital accessibility. UK Government is also a good example of best practice which reaches from central government out to my own village’s website. These examples emphasise that it is not a problem of engineering that is the key to the problem. it has long been known how to design and implement digitally accessible websites. The problem is more about raising awareness with the leadership of individual organisations of their social responsibility.
The following is a quotation from the Guidelines:
‘Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these, and some accommodation for learning disabilities and cognitive limitations; but will not address every user need for people with these disabilities. These guidelines address accessibility of web content on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. Following these guidelines will also often make Web content more usable to users in general.’
From my recent experience many organisations are completely unaware of the need for digital accessibility and if they are unaware then it is virtually impossible that a website (or smartphone or tablet app) has good accessibility. Putting this more bluntly if your website is one of the 96.8% with accessibility errors then you are placing disabled people, albeit unwittingly, into Digital Poverty.
Chris is an Ambassador for the Digital Poverty Alliance where he is an evangelist for digital accessibility. He is a former IBM Fellow, now retired with over fifty years of experience in the IT industry.