Easy access for all.

(From Financial Director)

Byline: Tom Berry.

There are more than two million blind or partially sighted people in the UK, and nine million people with hearing problems. One in four households have a disabled family member. Why then don't UK companies make their websites more accessible to these groups?

Some would argue that the idea of websites for the blind is just another example of political correctness gone mad. After all, the internet is, in essence, a visual medium and the last thing designers think about when building corporate websites is how accessible they are for someone who can't see. But here's a word of warning: the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 states that websites offering any form of service are to be treated as an extension of business premises and, as such, must be fully accessible to disabled users. In effect, a company's website must be as accessible as the front door to its office and companies that ignore this are liable for prosecution.

OK, so no one in the UK has successfully brought action against a website over access ... yet. And, as there is no UK case law to fall back on, court action is made more complicated. But in Australia, a blind man called Bruce Maguire successfully took the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games to court in 2001 because he could not use its website with his sighted children.

The accessibility issue for many websites lies in how blind people use the internet. In order to read pages, people with sight problems can use special software called a screen reader that literally speaks the content of web pages to them. This is fine if websites are mostly text based, but as sites become more reliant on graphics to communicate information this leaves blind people disadvantaged.

A recent report by web accessibility consultancy SciVisum states that websites which directly tackle the accessibility issue form only a tiny minority of the thousands of corporate websites in the UK. In its survey, 79% of major private and public sector organisations' websites failed basic accessibility compliance criteria, such as providing alternate text for graphic content. And many rely heavily on JavaScript or Flash animation technology without basic HTML alternatives that can be picked up by screen readers. But most worryingly, of the 111 websites that claim to be fully ...