How access-friendly is broadband?

Are web site owners in danger of being carried away with broadband? Is web site accessibility suffering as a result?

These are a few of the questions that have been arising lately as webmasters, developers and site owners grapple with the quandary presented by ever greater levels of broadband access. Namely, the dilemma is how far to push the envelope with broadband-enabled sites that offer improved levels of interactivity, video and audio. With multimedia possibilities vastly superior over anything that has gone before, where are the new boundaries of functionality, usability and design?

In this new quest for a frontier, there is a very real danger that some sites will press ahead with little thought for web accessibility. And this will cost them, not least with regard to legally-enforceable obligations to make web sites accessible to users with disabilities.

Although disabled access is widely perceived to mean wheelchair ramps and other design modifications to shops, offices and public buildings, the weight of the Disability Discrimination Act applies equally to web sites as well.

The Act aims to ensure that people with disabilities including blindness, poor eyesight, colour blindness and co-ordination problems can make full use of web sites. Though this may appear, at face value, to be onerous, there are some compelling hard-nosed business reasons in addition to the legal obligations for complying. For, in the main, what is required for web accessibility for the disabled is also good from a search engine optimisation and device compatibility perspective. So not only does a web site avoid potential problems with the law, its visibility is enhanced for disabled people and a wider audience as well.

Compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act, then, is good for business. Put simply, more site visitors mean more sales and lead generation. According to some estimates, the UK's disabled consumers spend up to £55 billion a year on goods and services. Reaching this audience in a way that is fully accessible to them represents a large market by anyone’s standards.

Add in the extra users gained through improvements in search engine optimisation and compatibility with devices such as mobile phones and hand-held computers etc. and it’s not rocket science to realise what this means for business.

Work on a definitive UK standard is on-going, but meantime there are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to go by. Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international body that creates Web standards, their ‘A’ rating system is, generally, what has been adopted by web developers and industry as the recognised benchmark.

We will return to look in greater detail at the rationale and design considerations, but for now here are some quick-fix measures to improve accessibility at a stroke:

Think Big – size pages using percentage-based measures rather than absolute sizes. This makes text easier to increase in size for users with sight difficulties

Alt Text – screen readers need Alt text to make sense of images on a page. Alt text is the short description that appears when a mouse passes over an image. Absence of Alt text is a major problem for a variety of users.

Alt Everything – give users the option to view your entire site as text only. This isn’t a big job by any stretch.

Alt. Multimedia – if a site offers video or audio, it should offer a text transcript as well. This is good practice for accessibility, and for slow connection users or those who wish to have print-out.

Click what? – a major no-no that’s easy to eliminate is the ‘click here’ syndrome. Taken out of context from the surrounding text, do the links make sense? And are there repeat instances of ‘click here’ links. Give link text a bit more thought and/or provide a link description that appears like Alt text.

Check contrast – is the text easy to distinguish against the background colour? Partially sighted and colour blind people may have difficulty reading text with insufficient contrast between text colour and background colour. The best combination is, unsurprisingly, black and white.