Accessibility to be important issue in future, U.K. consultant tells conference

The threat of legal action should be one reason why new media designers must incorporate accessibility for individuals who are visually impaired or face other challenges surfing the web, says one consultant in the field. In a presentation to the International New Media Festival on October 17, Nicola Teece of U.K.-based experteece told delegates that the increasing threat of discrimination lawsuits around the world coupled with ethical reasons as well as the promise of tapping a new audience of would-be ecom buyers should have web site designers and project managers thinking about how to reach an audience of otherwise shut-out Internet users. Moreover, said Teece, designers must look past accepted wisdom as to what constitutes a good web site, citing examples of widely praised sites that nonetheless don’t serve a large proportion of the market effectively. She gave the example of the U.K.’s Tesco Supermarket chain, which recently built a new accessible site to complement its main groceries ecommerce portal (http://www.tesco.com/access). She said previous complaints about the impossibility of using the main site led Tesco to enlist the help of the Royal National Institute for the Blind. The accessible site was unveiled to great fanfare, but new complaints immediately surfaced. She said the decision to build a second, separate site resulted in users of the accessible area being unable to get access to additional information about products, for instance. Worse, users with vision or other impairments couldn’t take advantage of special offers on the main site. Making two versions of a site, she warned, is a bad practice. "You are asking, really, to be sued for discrimination." Teece emphasized that while building web sites for the broader community will avoid potential legal troubles, it’s also a way to tap a greater buying public. She noted that two million people in the U.K. have visual impairments, many of whom are even more likely than the seeing to want to buy items online. Building an accessible site, she stressed, doesn’t mean foregoing rich content. "This doesn’t mean it should be boring. It should push the boundaries of creativity," she tells Canadian NEW MEDIA. Teece said good design principles can work in lock-step making it possible for text-readers – programs which read the contents of web sites aloud – to navigate sites quickly. During her presentation, she outlined the guidelines issued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on accessibility. Designers should strive, for instance, to put groups of links together on a page, with easy ways to skip to other content, and place redundant links in pages for items such as clickable image maps. But the issue of accessibility doesn’t appear to be a top priority with Canadian web designers. To date, there have been no legal actions arising from allegations of discrimination, and Canadian laws don’t specifically target the issue. While information isn’t easy to come by, it appears anyone wishing to push an accessibility case would be forced to rely on the blanket provisions of the Canadian Human Rights Act and pieces of similar provincial legislation. Common Look and Feel guidelines for federal government web sites do, however, mandate compliance with W3C criteria. In the United States recently, a high profile accessibility case involving Southwest Airlines was thrown out of a federal court. On October 18, U.S. district judge Patricia Seitz ruled that The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) doesn’t apply to the Internet. The suit was filed by an advocacy group and a blind man, Robert Gumson, to force Southwest to rebuild its web site to provide access to the visually impaired. In a 12-page decision, Seitz writes: "To expand the ADA to cover ‘virtual’ spaces would be to create new rights without well-defined standards. The plain and unambiguous language of the statute and relevant regulations does not include Internet web sites."

Accessibility to be important issue in future, U.K. consultant tells conference

News | 10/30/2002 5:00 am EST

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