Ensuring People with Disabilities have Equal Access

by Liam McDermott, 29 March 2007 - 6:23pm

Continuing the ‘Web Standards for Everyone’ series, this article discusses the use of Web standards to ensure the disabled have equal access to Web sites.

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.

—Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web.

How do People with Disabilities Surf?

Many people with disabilities require assistive technology when browsing Web pages; most commonly these are screen or Braille readers that convert the code within a page to speech or Braille^[1]. This technology is not only used by the blind, but anyone that has problems reading, ranging from dislexia, the mobility-impaired to someone who's eyes are tired (this isn't a disability, but is a reason to use a screen-reader).

Some examples of screen-readers:

Orca (FLOSS; part of the GNOME project)
Jaws (proprietary; probably the most used)
Window Eyes (proprietary)

Legal Reasons to Ensure Universal Access

In many countries laws are in place to ensure disabled people have equal access to online businesses (in fact many standard business laws regarding disabled access are relevant online). In the US a lawsuit against a company called Target is underway, meanwhile in Australia the organisers of the Sydney Olympics were fined A$20,000 for having an inaccessible Web site.

There's little reason to worry about being sued though, both the organisers of the Olympics and Target were given ample time and guidance to fix the problems with their sites. The problem was that they ignored the problems believing the people would go away!

Some Guidelines

This is where the structure of a document becomes important, if it does not flow—as most non-standards compliant web pages don’t—then the conversion to speech/Braille will not happen smoothly. This problem usually happens when tables are used for layout, blocks of text can be interrupted by cells needed for the page design. Instead of lists designers use tables: one cell for the bullet-point, another for the list text. An example of bad design is available courtesy of The University of Western Ontario.

Following the online accessibility guidelines will ensure your site is readable by all. There are two major guidelines: the W3C WCAG and the US goverments own guidelines for Web sites, Section 508. An online tool for testing a site against guidelines is also available. This is useful, but no tool can check for everything, a designer should always look through the guideline checklist themselves, ensuring their site is compliant.

Web Standards and Accessibility Guidelines ensure documents are written in such a way that any standards compliant technology is able to read them.