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The new Publicly Available Specification (PAS 78) for accessible website content design and development will fill a void created by a lack of clarity within the Disability Discrimination Act, which seems to allow everyone to make up their own interpretation of what is an accessible website. This legislation fails to make the W3C’s guidelines into a stringent standard, and this has led to much misinterpretation, many misunderstandings and even complacency in some cases.

“The Act requires organisations to take ‘reasonable steps’ to ensure their sites are accessible. This is obviously something that can only be tested in law and ‘reasonable’ is a vague term,” comments Ian Dunmore of the Public Sector Forums, who then adds:  “However, the DRC recently commissioned the British Standards Institution to create a PAS (Publicly Available Specification) which should help those procuring websites to understand better how to make their sites accessible and thus take the ‘reasonable’ steps the Act requires.”

No-one as yet has been taken to court for failing compliance in the UK, but the new British Standard Institution’s PAS 78 should at least create more consensus on what constitutes an accessible website. It should also motivate those who’ve yet to realise their legal, ethical, organisational and commercial obligations to become fully website accessibility compliant. The establishment of a Steering Group should, providing it includes all of the top experts and providers of website accessibility solutions, also herald a new dawn of collaboration.

The DRC’s initiative, perhaps, represents a ‘carrot’ approach to increasing and educating organisations about the imperative of compliance. However, research suggests that maybe there also needs to be a ‘stick’ approach to increase the uptake of compliance and to reduce such complacency. These organisations should realise that disabled users represent a significant customer-base and so they should not be ignored, particularly as there are a number of marketing opportunities to be gained from them, which can have benefits for both public and private organisations.

Britannia Building Society is a fine example of good and ethical practice in this particular area, having risen from the bottom of the SiteMorse league table to the number one spot after taking significant steps to improve its website’s accessibility. Britannia’s website manager, Linda Mellor, explains why accessibility is so important to her company:

“As an organisation, Britannia has a commitment to being ethically and socially responsible, so we want to ensure that it is easy for all of our customers to do business with us online, regardless to the type of technology that they are using as well as their ability. We are achieving this using a combination of automated and manual testing for accessibility.”

PAS 78 is not a full British Standard, but it is quicker to introduce. It will be introduced in the autumn of 2005, whereas a full British Standard could take several years to develop and introduce into the market. The other benefit of this approach, explains the DRC, is that it can be regularly updated. In fact it will be updated every two years.

A DRC commissioned research study into 1,000 UK websites and accessibility testing by City University shows that the PAS 78 should potentially fill a gap: 81% of the tested websites failed to meet even the most basic criteria (Priority 1 A), and disabled users were recruited as part of the assessments. The research shows that 97% of most large organisations are aware of their legal duties to achieve the basic levels of compliance, but for some reason there is no evidence of any attempt to meet such standards. Around 68% of these, according to the DRC’s report, “The Web: Access and Inclusion for Disabled People’, claimed to take accessibility into account.

It is important to stress that the DRC and other organisations should not dismiss automated testing as being part of a myth about website accessibility or accuse it of creating confusion. The truth is that automated testing should be backed up and complemented by a variety of manual and usability tests to make sure that website accessibility can be achieved to the highest levels possible, or at least to the minimum standards of compliance.  PAS 78 is an important way forward to establishing a benchmark for all, and one that will benefits all users of the web.

By Graham Jarvis
Editor and Media Services Consultant
Email: editor@cimtech.org