Can you afford to be inaccessible?

You may have heard of the Disabilities Discrimination Act 1995 and if not, it is very likely that you should know about it! Why you say? Well, if you are currently selling or intending to sell goods or services in the future over a website you have a legal obligation to ensure that the goods and services are equally accessible to all persons including disabled persons. This right of access by disabled persons came into force in October 2004 and therefore you must take steps now to ensure that your website is compliant.

Your obligation is to make “reasonable efforts” to ensure that the goods and services offered by you can be easily accessed by disabled persons. Disabled persons are defined as a person “with a physical or mental impairment which has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on his ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities”. This definition may cover a large number of persons and include amongst others visually impaired (e.g. are blind, have low vision or are colour blind), are hard of hearing of deaf, suffer from dyslexia or other learning, memory or seizure disorders.

In view of this, it is important that your website is designed in such a way to assist such persons to access your website. Some of the features you may wish to incorporate into your website may include any of the following:

alterable font sizes;
clear colour contrast between the text and background;
using simple language;
provide meaningful alt tags for all images;
use xhtml and stylesheets for layout avoiding tables;
use tables for tabular data only and provide clear headings;
provide alternative content where video or flash is used;
provide alternative text content where audio is used;

You are only obliged to use reasonable efforts to ensure equal treatment and not to treat disabled persons less favourably. The Disability Rights Commission has clarified that a person will be treated “less favourably” in the event that the person is “treated less favourably than other customers by: refusing service to him or her; providing him or her with a lower standard of service; or by providing him or her with a service on worse terms”.

To assist website owners in their compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, the World Wide Web Consortium, also known as W3C, has issued a “Code of Practice: Rights of Access Goods, Facilities, Services and Premises”(www.w3.org/wai/), which provides guidelines and recommendations on the type features that can be incorporated to make a website more user friendly. The RNIB site (www.rnib.org.uk) is also very helpful and provides further links.

If you do not take any steps to incorporate or take reasonable steps such as the ones recommended, you will most likely be deemed to be in breach of the legislation, in which case you as the website owner may be sued and be required to pay damages.

Recently the Disability Rights Commission launched an informal investigation of 1000 websites and found that over 80% of these websites were “next to impossible for disabled persons to use”. This clearly indicates that there is a long way to go!

However, given the ease with which the Disability Rights Commission can investigate compliance of websites without you knowing it is strongly recommended to take the necessary measures to ensure compliance. Prosecution will not only be expensive but a real PR “own goal”!