Current Edition : April, 2004

A Time to Act:

Most websites are not friendly

An investigation by the Disability Rights Commission in UK shows that most websites are unusable by disabled people.
This means that many everyday activities carried out on the internet - booking a holiday, managing a bank account, buying theatre tickets or finding a cheaper credit card - are difficult or impossible for many disabled people.

Bert Massie, DRC Chairman described the situation as "unacceptable", and said the organisation was determined not to allow disabled people to be left behind by technology.

A thousand websites were tested for the survey using automated software, and detailed user testing was carried out on 100 sites, including government, business, e-commerce, leisure and web services such as search engines.

The results showed that the worst affected groups were those with visual impairments. Blind people involved in testing websites were unable to perform nearly all of the tasks required of them despite using devices such as screen readers.

The internet has been around for more than 10 years, yet this issue has not been taken seriously. If fact this is an environment that could be used to bring all, on a level playing field, at a fraction of the cost, with implications that are enormous.

Bert Massie in a public message warned website owners to improve accessibility or be prepared to face legal action, at least in the UK under the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act that requires information providers to make their services accessible.

The problems most commonly encountered by the disabled website testers were cluttered pages, confusing navigation, failure to describe images and poor color contrast between background and text.