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The case for accessible websites
11 Oct 2011
Topics: Accessibility, Web development, BS 8878
For good or bad, the internet is now the norm for many aspects of daily life, yet many website owners are still not making it sufficiently accessible for disabled and older people. The business case for doing so is strong, and now a new standard from BSI provides a comprehensive roadmap for making pragmatic accessibility choices.
What did you do online this week? Checked your bank balance? Booked your annual leave from work? Watched some TV? Downloaded a song? Completed your tax return or perhaps bought some business insurance?
In the past, the web was simply something to view, but today we want to interact, transact and take part online. Yet when the UK's Disability Rights Commission (DRC, now part of the Equality and Human Rights Commission) investigated website accessibility, it found that 81 per cent of websites failed to provide even a basic level of accessibility to the millions of disabled and older people who want to use the web[1].
On the face of it this is strange. Disability affects 15-20 per cent of every country's population: there are at least 650 million people with disabilities worldwide. In the UK alone, disabled people have £80bn to spend, and in the US they have $220bn[2]. What's more, 83 per cent of disabled customers will switch to competitors offering greater accessibility[3].
The proportion of elderly people in the developed world's population is also set to grow significantly - in the next 20 years, the number of Europeans aged over 65 will increase by 52.3 per cent[4]. The proportion of the population that needs accessible websites is, therefore, becoming more significant.
Meanwhile, the DRC decided that the dearth of accessible sites stems from both a "lack of interest and knowledge on the part of website developers, and from perceived commercial obstacles to accessibility on the part of website commissioners, notwithstanding that anecdotal evidence suggests that this concern is misplaced."
Lack of awareness
It is Waqas Chauhdry's experience that lack of awareness sits at the heart of the matter. Chauhdry is managing director at leading disability and diversity consultancy DEO Consultancy UK. When he talks to clients, they're surprised to hear their sites are inaccessible. "I have yet to meet a client who would actually say, 'Yes I know our site is inaccessible'," he says. "They just take it for granted that it is accessible."
"The difficulty," he explains, "is that most web developers simply don't have the understanding around accessibility and usability, and I think that goes back to their training. I believe that for web developers there are no mandatory modules within their qualifications covering how to embed accessibility at the design stage."
And hand in hand with a lack of awareness is a perception that investing in accessibility is not a cost worth paying, although this perception seems to have little bearing on reality.
Take the experience of Tesco, the leading online grocery supplier in the UK. Tesco initially built an accessible site (Tesco Access) to run alongside their existing site, yet found that within 12 months of launch Tesco Access was attracting a wide audience and had delivered £13m of spend, against a development cost of only £35,000. The site also needed no modifications to be accessed on hand-held devices with low-speed connections and limited screen sizes. Subsequently, Tesco took down their original site and went with the accessible one. It was just more cost-effective to maintain, and shoppers preferred it.
Insurance giant Legal & General tells a similar story. When it launched an accessible site, search engine traffic increased by 25 per cent within 24 hours; Google rankings improved significantly; and reduced maintenance saved £200,000 per annum. Within 12 months, Legal & General saw a 100 per cent ROI. L&G's customer experience director, Caroline Fawcett, said, "The new site has almost doubled the number of visitors seeking quotes and buying Legal & General financial products online. It has cut maintenance costs by two thirds and increased the amount of natural search traffic we get by half as much again." [5]
Chauhdry adds, "My understanding of business is that nobody actually wants to refuse any customers. Accessibility is a very practical way to attract more customers because you are meeting the needs of a much wider user group if you get it right."
Clearing the way
With the publication of BS 8878 Web Accessibility Code of Practice, getting it right has now become much easier. Published at the end of November 2010, the code is designed to work as a companion document to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) - the internationally recognized set of guidelines that tell web developers, at a technical level, how to construct accessible websites.
BS 8878 is intended to be a bridge between technicians using WCAG and the decision-makers who commission and 'own' websites. The standard delivers accessibility awareness by setting out the steps in the web development process, and at each juncture flagging the issues and decisions that will impact accessibility.
So, for instance, if the site's text is 'hard coded', the impact is that people with sight impairments or dyslexia may not be able to change the colour scheme or font size to make the site usable.
"The standard is saying: be aware that this decision might exclude the two million people in the UK identified as dyslexic and two million others, including older people, with sight impairments," says Jonathan Hassell, head of usability and accessibility at BBC Future Media, and lead author of BS 8878. "You may want to rethink the decision based on the site's purpose and the audience that it is designed to reach." He adds: "BS 8878's role is simply to enable better informed, pragmatic decision-making with regard to accessibility."
And the point about 'pragmatic' is important. Both Hassell and Graeme Whippy, senior manager of Lloyds Banking Group's Group Disability Programme, agree that the business case is key.
As Whippy puts it, "Managers will ask what it's going to cost and I think it's right they do so. In the business world, there are competing priorities. Our job in accessibility is to work with business owners and impress on them that making the right choices early in the process is much more cost-effective than retrofitting later. Or, if there are compelling business reasons for purchasing something that isn't accessible to all users, they should document the rationale, understand the impact and ensure they have appropriate mitigating actions to minimize the impact on users and cost of remediation."
The cost of accessibility
So what exactly is the cost of accessibility? Chauhdry puts it at around five per cent of the total project cost if you start at the design review stage. "If you start it later," he says, "that cost could be anything between five and 15 per cent."
"Being aware of the costs and benefits of different accessibility issues is essential for informed decision-making", says Hassell. Much of the time accessibility is about choice more than cost. Choosing to tag images and forms so that screen-reader software can read out websites for blind people; choosing to configure and design the page so that people with arthritic hands or other mobility impairments can navigate using the keyboard because they can't use a mouse. However, some issues incur greater cost, for example, choosing to subtitle video content for deaf people.
The rewards are a wider audience for your site; better compliance; quicker download times; mobile device-ready sites; search-engine-visible video content; and more productive employees, because internal interfaces benefit from accessibility too. The business case for accessibility is a strong one, and now BS 8878 provides the tool to put it in place.
[1] http://www-hcid.soi.city.ac.uk/research/DRC_Report.pdf
[2] http://www.realising-potential.org/case-studies/industry/e-commerce.html
[3] According to research conducted by the Employers' Forum on Disability and RADAR
[4] http://www.realising-potential.org/stakeholder-factbox/disabled-people-worldwide/#fn1
[5] http://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/legal-and-general-case-study
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