The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) proves hostile to findings that show it to have failed basic accessibility compliance requirements, and its response adds confusion to an already confused market.
The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) requires businesses and organisations to make websites accessible to all users, particularly the disabled. Yet the DRC and the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) along with the Royal National Institute for the Deaf (RNID), the supposed standard bearers for website accessibility, continue to fail even the most basic A/AA requirements. The findings and the reports produced by SiteMorse showed, for example, demonstrates that the DRC’s website failed both A / AA continually over the last few months – even following a rather sharp letter from their chairman back in May, explaining our tests had ‘caught them on a bad day, the error was not on their own site but that of a sponsor…’ article at the end of the document, SiteMorse then re-checked the report to find a problems, one as basic as the image description on the letter from the Chief Executive
Top Site in the report was Red Ant, achieving full compliance for accessibility (based on the automated tests that are possible) Gavin Massey – Head of Accessibility at Red Ant commented ‘We are obviously very pleased with this result. SiteMorse testing is a key part of our development process. We have always had the policy ’to practice what we preach’ and have found SiteMorse reports to be essential when aiming for WCAG AA+ for the mandatory ’valid HTML’ testing. Other popular products just don’t offer this.
While the importance of automated testing is clear, it does not guarantee true accessibility until it’s put to the test by people with disabilities. Red Ant work with a number of disabled internet users to ensure our websites offer the highest levels of accessibility to everyone. We encourage the competition and awareness these league tables bring.’
Head of Media at the DRC, Patrick Edwards, gave me a hostile reception when interviewed about the test results. He seemed to place usability testing through human interaction above web accessibility compliance. He caused confusion when he inferred in a telephone conversation that there are no legal standards for website accessibility, even though a number of DRC speeches and documents (including comments made in the Guardian) clearly state that it is a legal duty for organisations and businesses to make their sites accessible to the UK’s 8-10 million disabled people.
The DRC made no comment about the number of other problems lettered across their site, broken links, pages that do not work correctly and missing images.
The DRC’s own chairman, Bert Massie, even said in April 2004: “Organisations that offer goods and services on the Web already have a legal duty to make their sites accessible.” The transcripted speeches made at Islington’s Business Design Centre at that time on ‘The Web: Access and Inclusion for Disabled People’ emphasise the legal duty of organisations and businesses to ensure that their websites are accessible, or they could potentially face prosecution for discrimination under the DDA.
Now I wouldn’t claim to be an expert, but Edwards’ comments and tone during the interview and in an email that followed the conversation were shocking and puzzling. “You asked whether there were legal standards for web site accessibility and there are not”, he later said and added, “There are duties under part 3 of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (the 1999 duties) which require services provided over the web which make it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to receive a service to make reasonable adjustments. The law does not spell out what these adjustments are.”
“There are web guidelines for accessibility and I expressed the view, also supported in our report, that meeting technical access requirements was not sufficient in itself to guarantee that the disabled people could actually use the sites. Our formal investigation revealed that where minimal access standards were achieved in line with ‘A’ level registration – the lowest, there were unfortunately few sites that achieved a standard above this – significant numbers of disabled users still had problems using the site. I made it clear to you that involving disabled people in testing sites allied to meeting technical compliance was a surer way of ensuring that sites were able to be used by disabled people.”
He also claimed that SiteMorse’s reports on the DRC’s site were erroneous, and that they actually reflected an external site that was only linked to its own. However, he refused to provide further information or comment when he was asked to show what the errors were in the reports; that is until further evidence is supplied. SiteMorse says it will be sending this to him in due course.
Nick Le Seelleur, director of SiteMorse commented: “The Child Support Agency and many others have found that our tools have helped them to achieve higher levels of web accessibility compliance; our tests and reports have proven themselves to be very accurate and even more accurate than those of rival tools like Bobby.”
The RNIB: Keen to Improve
The RNIB, which was more welcoming, appeared keener to get to the bottom of the problem. It also rated usability quite highly, but suggested that it is of equal importance and part of the same coin. Its Press Officer, Bill Alker, supports a combined approach to testing and believes that user evaluation is ‘under-utilised’. He said that his organisation’s site “conforms to the RNIB’s ‘See it Right’ accreditation, which is based on the WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.”
Alker advises that companies and organisations should, “Involve their potential users of their web site in testing designs from the earliest stage, including disabled users. Frequent user testing can ensure ’real usability’ for disabled people, and the results are much more useful than those produced by using automated testing tools alone" Great emphasis is placed on ‘likely human behaviour.’ He also claimed that automated tools cannot test the appropriateness of ALT text descriptions.
To determine how accessible your website is, please contact us. For further details on making your website accessible, visit the Disability Rights Commission or read our report on 8 benefits of Accessible web sites.
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