E-Access Bulletin Live

All new UK public sector websites must conform to at least ‘AA’ accessibility standards as specified by the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, according to guidance published this month by the Cabinet Office.

Existing central government department websites must conform to ‘AA’ by December 2009 and all other government agencies and non- departmental bodies by March 2011, according to the guidance, ‘Delivering inclusive websites’ ( www.coi.gov.uk/guidance.php?page=129 ).
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An umbrella specification for website standards, including references to usability and accessibility standards, has been published by the British Standards Institution (www.bsi-global.com).

The Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 124, entitled ‘Defining, implementing and managing website standards,’ covers 11 separate categories of website quality, of which accessibility and usability are two. It was commissioned from the BSi by website content management software provider Magus (www.magus.co.uk).
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Local councils should carry out both technical accessibility testing and
user testing of their websites to minimise exclusion of people with
disabilities, and not just take one or other approach, a new report from
the local government Society of IT Management (Socitm) finds.
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The local government Society of IT Management (Socitm) this week published a report on website accessibility which included a round-up of the five most common accessibility errors.

The society estimates that these five errors account for 76% of all website accessibility failures, and it asked Robin Christopherson, Head of Accessibility Services at the charity AbilityNet, to describe their impact. Robin is blind and uses the popular ‘JAWS’ screen reader software to access the web.

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Although awareness of the importance of web accessibility is now relatively high after years of struggle by disability campaigners, website owners and developers still face a confusing task in trying to ascertain exactly what they should do to make their sites accessible.

There are a variety of guidelines and standards, and the main recognised international standard, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), is now outdated. A new version – WCAG 2.0 – might appear next year, but no-one is holding their breath since already almost a decade of wrangling and delays has passed since the appearance of WCAG version 1.0.

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Government websites may be stripped of their ‘gov.uk’ domain names if they fail to meet tough new standards of accessibility to web users with disabilities, according to confidential draft proposals seen by E- Access Bulletin’s sister publication E-Government Bulletin.

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I’m off to ICC 2007 next week to run a couple of workshops and run a camp Blog, see my post to this effect over at my Blog and please follow the camp blog and comment too to let the students know you're out there.