Published on 21 February 2007

Yet we are still to see a decisive, industry-wide move towards ensuring our systems can be used by the disabled.
From the layperson’s perspective, this sluggishness is hard to comprehend. The Cabinet Office’s basic accessibility checklist for online services sounds simple enough. Conformance might even end up saving you money. Making pages “simple and easy to understand”, ensuring “sufficient contrast between text and background colours” and providing a “consistent navigation” throughout are likely to increase the efficiency of all your users, not just the visually impaired. Plus you’ll earn extra corporate social responsibility points and avoid the possibility of future legal penalties.
And if you are considering making more of your systems available online, this could be the ideal opportunity. Not only do web-based applications offer more access features than their desktop forbears, they can improve your existing workflow and open up new business channels, allowing brokers to credit check their own proposals and customers to request finance directly. Add to this the fact that online systems are updated centrally rather than on a laborious and error-prone per-PC basis, and the DDA looks like a blessing.

For Every Silver Lining There’s a Cloud
Delve a little deeper into the Cabinet Office site, however, and the picture becomes less rosy. Your first challenge is to decide whose guidelines to follow. How disability discrimination policies apply to software varies widely at international, national and regional levels and so the specific legal obligations of business is hard to gauge. A $20,000 (AUD) ruling against the 2000 Sydney Olympics website is the only benchmark we have and even American litigators have been slow to make a showing. Perhaps they are still trying to make sense of a clause in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) which grants exemption to businesses if compliance would cause them “undue burden and hardship”.
In the UK the messages are no less mixed. Many government webpages fail to practise what they preach – the Prime Minister’s own site includes a petition for all .gov.uk websites to satisfy specific accessibility criteria whilst failing to meet these itself.

A Pragmatic Approach
Rather than pursue every standard around or simply give up the chase, a more realistic starting point on the path to accessibility is for businesses to measure their software against the most universally respected specification, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Published by the World Wide Web consortium (W3C), these form the basis for the requirements set out by many organisations, the Cabinet Office and the RNIB included.
For most desktop applications, certain checkpoints – such as ensuring that form fields can be edited using only the keyboard – can be met with relative ease. For the moment, however, full conformance is a technical impossibility. The authoring tools and technologies simply do not come up to scratch. Even such mainstream formats as PDF have yet to receive the W3C seal of approval.

Future-Proof Your Web Offering
If you are committed to making your software fully accessible, going online is your best bet.
The WCAG’s key message to web developers is this – use the core technologies of HTML and CSS fully and correctly and accessibility will follow. HTML is used to provide all the structural information that assistive technologies such as screen readers for the blind need to make sense of your webpages – from form field labels to textual descriptions of images. Stylistic information (fonts, colours, appearance of buttons etc.) can then be added by a separate CSS file so users of conventional web browsers are presented with a visually rich user interface.
In practice this clear separation of style from structure is hard, but not impossible, to achieve. Because web browsers implement CSS imperfectly, knowledge of undocumented workarounds is required to ensure that WCAG compliance is achieved without compromising visual design. Many websites, Amazon and eBay included, still use invalid HTML to create a newspaper-style multiple column layout because it is so difficult to achieve without breaking W3C rules.
Nevertheless, ensuring your web applications use HTML and CSS correctly is worth the extra effort. Standards-compliant webpages rank higher with search engines and have significantly smaller filesizes. And with a solid HTML foundation in place, radical changes to the look and feel can be accomplished in hours rather than weeks by modifying a single CSS file – a very effective way of offering alternative branding of the same core application to different groups of users.

Can You Afford To Wait?
The pressure on governments and interest groups to standardise their policy on web accessibility - by adopting the WCAG fully - grows daily. It will prove more expensive and disruptive for business to convert web applications once the legal position becomes less ambiguous than to start the process now. It is estimated that it would have cost $2.8 million (AUD) to retrofit the Sydney Olympics site with even the most basic access features. To meet more demanding accessibility standards, such non-W3C compliant websites would have to be rebuilt from scratch.