Internet Newsletter for Lawyers |
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The biggest issue is probably the order of things on the page. If your page uses tables to
control how content is presented on the page then the screen reading software will have a hard
time. Should it read across the row or down the columns? How does it know? Does the page
make any sense if the software reads the rows when the information is actually presented in
columns (or vice versa)?
The answer is not to use tables to control the layout of pages. For many years now there has
been a much better way of controlling page layout – a technology called Cascading Style
Sheets (CSS).
The other main benefit of building websites with CSS is that they become accessible to a much
larger range of internet devices…as well as to disabled users. A blind person using screen
reader software will understand your pages far more easily since the content is clearly
presented and signposted: “this is the content – read me” and “here is the presentation
information”. But a fully sighted user with a Blackberry or smart phone will also benefit.
In my opinion, the absolute minimum you need to do is to ensure that your website is built using
CSS so that fancy layouts no longer hinder accessibility for disabled users. You may find that
your developer has not implemented the standards 100% but provided you have a CSS based
site any accessibility problems that are brought to your attention will be relatively easy to
correct.
My colleague David Gilroy has written a very detailed paper for the newsletter entitled
Ensuring your Website is DDA Compliant which looks at each of the requirements in turn and gives some practical
advice about how to satisfy them. You can download this as a Microsoft Word document from
www.venables.co.uk/n0511accessible2.doc.
(Right click on the link, choose a location on your system, download the article and then open it in Word.)
Andrew Gray and David Gilroy are joint Managing Directors of Conscious Solutions,
www.conscious.co.uk, a firm that delivers websites, intranets and marketing solutions
exclusively to Law Firms.
Email agray@conscious.co.uk, dgilroy@conscious.co.uk.
Back to Contents.
Web Accessibility – Why Bother?
You may remember the article "Is Your Website Accessible?" by my colleague David Gilroy
which appeared in the July/August 2004 issue of this newsletter (see
www.venables.co.uk/n0407accessibility.htm).
This time, we are providing two new articles - one
general and one more detailed. This first article tries to provide succinct answers to some
commonly asked questions; the more detailed article, by David Gilroy, is described at the end of this one.
by Andrew Gray
Why should I care about accessibility?
Believe it or not there are over 10 million adults in Britain covered by the Disability
Discrimination Act (1995) - you can’t afford to ignore this issue for ever and get away with it!
Hopefully you support the moral argument in favour of accessibility for all but if not then there
are sound marketing reasons to be as inclusive as possible (why irritate or partially exclude 10m
people?). But there’s a third less obvious reason why paying attention to accessibility issues
makes sense. If you build your website to be accessible then it will work better on the new
generation of internet devices (Blackberrys, smart phones, PDAs etc.). Many of the issues that
make websites inaccessible to disabled users turn out to be the same issues that make them
difficult to present on small screen devices.
Is text resizability necessary - and sufficient?
Why would you build a website and force all your users to view it at a particular font size? It’s
crazy! You don’t know how young their eyes are or how good their monitor is or even what
device they are using (don’t assume it’s a PC it could be smart phone). Furthermore, it’s easy
to build websites in such as way that the user can select their own font size. On accessible sites
you will often see a menu option that allows you to increase the font size. Is it sufficient just to
provide text resizability? Certainly not – there are many other issues to consider.
What about completely blind people?
Blind people are often very avid users of technology and a significant proportion of them will
already be in the habit of using special “screen reading” software. The software is basically a
browser (similar to Internet Explorer or Firefox). It retrieves a web page, processes it to extract
all the useful text and then starts to read the text to the user. As soon as you stop to think about
how your webpages might “sound” when read in this way there are some obvious issues.
What is CSS?
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is an international standard for controlling the presentation of
information. In the old days the way a page looked and what it contained would all be jumbled
up together. But for years now all good websites have been built in a way that keeps
“presentation” (the way the page looks) separate from “content” (what the page contains).
There are numerous benefits from this approach the most obviously of which is that you can
change your mind about design issues without having to edit every page of content. You decide
that headings should be red not blue? No problem! A small change to the style sheet and all
the pages on your website will be affected. It’s just like a well design Word template – if you
know even the basics about Word then you know not to apply font size to text in order to make
it appear as a heading. Rather you should apply a heading style to the text and then modify the
style sheet to control how headings appear.
How accessible is accessible?
The Disability Discrimination Act (1995) does not specify exactly how websites must be built in
order to be compliant. Instead the act (very wisely in such a fast moving technical environment
as the Internet) talks in terms of best practice and suggests that you’ll face prosecution only if
you fail to do what you reasonably can to make your site accessible.
Who sets the standards?
The most important organisation for Internet technologies is an industry body called the World
Wide Web consortium www.w3.org. To tackle the issue of accessibility they formed a project
called the “Web Accessibility Initiative” which has developed a number of technologies and
guidelines in this field. Read more about these at www.w3.org/WAI/.
Do most sites comply with DDA requirements?
Unfortunately not - most don’t even come close. Most were built 3+ years ago and are not using
CSS technology (even though it was available at that time).
Will non compliant sites be prosecuted?
Probably not – not for now anyway. The important thing is to make sure that when you do next
have your website designed, it is done properly. The existence of the legislation is having the
desired effect in that most large websites are now built with accessibility in mind. There are so
many good technical reasons to use the standards associated with accessibility that compulsion
via high-profile persecutions seem unlikely (at least for now).