Evolving Standards in Accessibility
There’s that elephant in the room again
We’ve all realised that WCAG isn’t the magic bullet to obeying accessibility legislation. While some companies “get it”, the rest are held down with frustration from the business with fuzzy definitions of the types of disability we’re supposed to be catering for, and an impossible to calculate legal risk from 10 year old legislation with no case law to refer to. This conference (pdf) was a comprehensive statement from web standards bodies that they understand where we’re coming from.
The speakers were from public bodies and charities, outlining free resources we can draw upon to fight the good fight in our respective industries. Most speakers were concerned that in the past, the responsibility fell on implementers of technology in the late stages of a project (using WCAG guidelines for front end website development for example), whereas much more cost effective accessibility solutions had been found by considering accessibility from the beginning of the product design process.
A Business Case for accessibility
A talk by Clive Holdsworth from the body tasked with enforcing legislation in the UK (The digital equality and human rights commission) detailed new legislation in the UK from 2010. The equality act supersedes the disabiliity discrimination act 1999. The key phrase to avoiding litigation: Companies need to make “reasonable adjustments” to comply with the legislation.
The focus on the new legislation shifts from discrimination against individuals, where an individual would need to initiate and pursue the complaint (which never happened in the UK), to policy discrimination against groups, where the commission can represent minorities with “protected characteristics”. This makes litigation and pressure from the commission much more likely.
“reasonable adjustments” means different things to different companies, but the main activity for us would be to produce clear accessibility policies and document any decision which affects users with accessibility requirements, and the business justifications of those decisions to limit accessibility.
As well as reminding us of the stick of the law, which isn’t a great motivator for change, they also dangled a carrot: they found that many accessibility solutions benefit all users, not just registered disabled ones, and gave huge competitive advantages for those companies who prioritised it.
A new standard has been developed by the BSI snappily called BS8878 (pdf) which is designed to help businesses interpret accessibility legislation into digital practice.
Action points for large businesses
Publish clear accessibility policies
Document decisions we’ve taken to either cater for, or not cater for disabled people in our products. This would mitigate us in the case of any discrimination court action.
Get buy in from senior managers for an accessibility initiative
Accessibility can’t just happen bottom up. It needs to be sold to the business as a great commercial strategy too.
Company wide awareness scheme
Get people of all levels within the company to take an accessibility e-learning course to raise awareness of accessibility issues online. There’s a free one that will be available soon from the EHRC.
Adopt a better user centred product design process with accessibility as a requirement
The Web Accessiblility Initiative have published a free and easily digestible book about digital accessibility & usability – we’re not just talking about the website here. It could be anything “information product” (CMS) “customer service product” (CRM, post booking & social media), “mobile product”...
Use automated accessibility evaluation tools & expert reviews
Automated tools are not content or user task aware so these can only be used as a baseline guide to rating accessibility in relation to good website development practice (a new version of WCAG has been published)
Testing with users
Include disabled people in usability tests, product & service focus groups.
Professional Accessibility Audits & certification
AbilityNet seem to be the leading charitable consultancy - they provide assessments & certification, and cite examples where companies have gained loads of positive PR from accessibility accreditation.
An interesting takeaway (from Robin Christopherson’s talk) is that most users of screen readers will always look for a mobile website – the streamlined, task based content and structure of mobile sites suits them down to the ground. Robin wondered why anyone would even bother using a “desktop” site…
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