E-Access Bulletin Live

Four out of five leading price comparison websites surveyed are inaccessible to disabled and elderly users, potentially putting them in breach of the Equality Act 2010, a new report has found.

Conducted by ICT access charity AbilityNet, the research presents a dismal picture of accessibility by disabled and elderly users for the websites, which allow people to compare prices of goods and services including online shopping and insurance prices.

(more…)

By Brian Kelly

For many web authors, developers and policy makers, the issue of accessibility to disabled people is addressed mainly by trying to ensure that their sites conform with the international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) maintained by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium.

For example, the UK Government’s ‘Delivering inclusive websites guidelines’ ( bit.ly/3lCReg ), published in 2009, said: “The minimum standard of accessibility for all public sector websites is Level Double-A of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. All new websites must conform to these guidelines from the point of publication.”

(more…)

Today’s technologically-skilled young people are likely to face significant web accessibility problems as they grow older, similar to those faced by elderly computer users today, a professor of computing has said.

Speaking to E-Access Bulletin ahead of his talk at this week’s W4A web accessibility conference in Lyon, France ( www.w4a.info/2012 ), Alan F. Newell, an emeritus professor at Dundee University’s School of Computing, said that he has “every expectation” that today’s young people will face problems using the web in the future, even if they currently have good computer skills. This will arise from their declining abilities (such as poorer eyesight, poorer cognition, poorer dexterity) struggling to cope with constant technological evolution, he said.

(more…)

The accessibility field needs a new international community of experts to help it become a recognised profession, Microsoft’s Chief Accessibility Officer told a recent conference.

Speaking at the sixth European Forum on e-Accessibility in Paris ( bit.ly/wHNjGf ), Rob Sinclair said: “The time has come for accessibility to transcend its origin and become an internationally recognised profession.”

(more…)

Almost half of local authority websites remain inaccessible to disabled users, according to the annual ‘Better Connected’ review of UK local authority sites, carried out by the Society of IT Management (Socitm).

Little has changed in the picture of council website accessibility since last year’s Better Connected, with only a 2% increase in the amount of councils achieving the assessment’s standard rating for accessibility – from 56% in 2011 to 58% (252 councils) this year. Within those 252 sites, only two (Kettering Borough Council and the London Borough of Merton) were rated as ‘Very Good’ under the scoring system, while 30% of websites (130 in total) were rated as having ‘Poor’ accessibility, and 12% (51 sites) were classed as ‘Inaccessible’.

(more…)

A ground-breaking project to enlist the power of volunteers to fix web access problems for disabled people is at risk of closure, after failing to secure government funding.

Fix the Web was launched in November 2010 to allow disabled internet users to complain quickly and easily about inaccessible websites using Twitter, email or online forms. Members of a pool of registered volunteers then take responsibility for contacting the website owner on the user’s behalf, following up any response and feeding back results to the user.

Since launch, the project has recruited almost 700 volunteers who between them have handled more than 1,000 website reports and helped to solve problems with several high profile sites including the Coventry Building Society, various BBC sites and the online scheduling service Doodle. A major rise in activity was triggered earlier this year after actor, writer and technology lover Stephen Fry posted a message of support for the campaign.

However, despite gaining £50,000 of initial funding from the Nominet Trust, and receiving publicity support from organisations including RNIB, the project has failed in attempts to raise further cash and has now been running for a year without any external funding.

After it emerged that a recent bid for funding from the government’s new £10 million Social Action Fund has failed, Fix The Web founder Gail Bradbrook, director of programmes at Citizens Online, told E-Access Bulletin the project would struggle to survive.

“The government asked for charities to innovate, and that’s what Citizens Online has done – we have raised multi-millions across all our projects over the years, with not a penny from central government. So we’re not a cap-in-hand charity, but equally we can’t run on fresh air.

“Fix The Web still has a huge amount of potential, but it needs some design work and some funding to oversee the work by volunteers. Come the New Year, if there isn’t a clear plan for the project, Citizens Online might have to withdraw because our brand will be associated with something that isn’t being looked after properly.”

The project could eventually be sustained by small donations from multiple sources, but in the short term needs around £150,000 over the next 18 months to help it reach a sustainable level, Bradbrook said.

Citizens Online managed to raise pledges of services worth some £270,000 to use as “in kind” match funding for its recent Social Action Fund bid. “This shows the level of support and commitment to the project. The issue is securing money, when so few funders fit to the aims of this project. Times are really hard for the voluntary sector, competition is steep,” she said.

Ironically, the project has attracted interest from organisations in other countries including Canada who would like to replicate it, Bradbrook said. The intention had always been to expand the work internationally, but this vision is now also in jeopardy.

A US class action against the Walt Disney Company for the alleged inaccessibility of its websites has reached an out of court settlement ahead of a trial that had been planned for January 2012, E-Access Bulletin has learned.

On 29 June, California district judge Dolly Gee gave permission for three blind women from California and Kansas to proceed with a class action alleging Disney’s are inaccessible to screen reader programs, hampering the ability of blind users to make reservations for the company’s theme parks and download electronic tickets.

The three women are represented by Andy Dogali at Florida-based law firm Forizs & Dogali, alongside Los Angeles-based attorney Eugene Feldman. Dogali has now told E-Access Bulletin the terms of a settlement have been agreed by the parties, subject to court approval as required by US law.

“We are presently documenting the settlement, so most of the precise details remain confidential, although I expect the process to require no more than another few weeks”, he said. “The supportive documents will be publicly filed in the very near future, along with the request for approval.”

The news of a pre-trial settlement may disappoint some observers, as a January trial would have raised the issue of a need for greater corporate web accessibility worldwide. Last month Samantha Fothergill, senior legal policy officer at UK blindness charity RNIB, said the fact that a company with such a high profile was being sued was bound to have an effect on corporate behaviour and lobbying campaigns elsewhere.

The UK’s leading charity supporting blind and partially sighted people RNIB is investigating whether people in the UK might be able to join a US class action against the Walt Disney Company for the alleged inaccessibility of its websites, E-Access Bulletin has learned.

On 29 June, California district judge Dolly Gee gave permission for three blind women – two from Southern California and one from Wichita, Kansas – to proceed with a class action against Disney alleging the company’s websites unlawfully include information which is visible to sighted users but not to screen reader programs, as well as options which are inaccessible to blind people such as the ability to make reservations and download electronic tickets.

Web accessibility is just one of five main areas of complaint being brought in the case, with others including issues in the theme parks themselves such as a lack of Braille maps. The plaintiffs are not seeking money damages, simply an injunction requiring Disney to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act by making its services accessible.

In her ruling judge Gee rejected as irrelevant arguments by Disney that the women could have accessed the same services and information elsewhere, and also rejected arguments that “there is no accepted accessibility standard”. In dismissing the latter argument she pointed out that nearly three years ago — “presumably when website accessibility standards were even less settled” – a similar action was allowed to proceed against the US retailer Target for alleged accessibility problems with its website Target.com.

The three women are represented by Andy Dogali at Florida-based law firm Forizs & Dogali, alongside Los Angeles-based attorney Eugene Feldman, with the case set for trial in Los Angeles in January 2012.

Talking to E-Access Bulletin this week Samantha Fothergill, senior legal policy officer at RNIB, said she had contacted the US lawyers handling the case to see if UK citizens could potentially play any part in adding an international dimension to the case.

“There is no recourse under UK law for the websites as you can only sue a website under the Equality Act if the provider is established in the UK, but because this is an international tourist attraction people from around the world, including Britain, could potentially be part of the US case.

“If so we might be able to find clients who had gone to those resorts, and could make people aware this action is going on – we would not be encouraging them to join, just passing on the information.”

UK class actions are rare in the field of disability law, Fothergill said, not least because all such cases tend to be settled out of court.

“Class actions are often used here in product liability cases but disability lawyers don’t often think in that way. We’ve looked at possibility of class actions but the cases that we have always get settled, so we’ve never really got to that stage.”

Whatever happens, the fact that a company with such a high profile worldwide is being sued anywhere is bound to have an effect on corporate behaviour and lobby campaigns elsewhere, she said.

“The Target case got more publicity probably among IT professionals than it necessarily did among blind people, but this case is more likely to raise the profile of access issues with those responsible for services and websites around the world, which can only be a good thing wherever you are.”

Disney is connected with a huge range of public-facing websites including sites for media partners ESPN and the ABC television network.

The RNIB is set to conduct its largest ever manual website accessibility testing exercise later this year, when it will check all 433 UK local authority sites against a specially-devised set of criteria.

The project will form the charity’s latest contribution to the annual ‘Better Connected’ review of UK council websites conducted by the public sector Society of IT Management (Socitm).

In previous years RNIB has run initial automated accessibility tests on all the sites, only carrying out more detailed manual assessment on those passing a certain threshold. This year, however, it will carry out manual checks on all sites based on attempts to perform three practical tasks on each such as paying council tax or renewing a library book online. A few other random top level pages will also be checked.

Marco Ranon, Principal Web Accessibility Consultant at RNIB, told a recent Socitm seminar in London the tests would not use a checklist approach against all the principles of the internationally accepted ‘WCAG [web content accessibility guidelines] 2.0’. Instead, though the guidelines would be used as a reference, the performance of tasks would be rated from 0-3 against 14 criteria such as presence of ; unique and informative page titles; and clear labels on forms, Ranon said. Some criteria such as the presence of keyboard shortcuts for tasks would be considered essential “showstoppers”, whose absence would spell failure of the test as a whole – again with close reference to WCAG, he said.

“Web accessibility is not about going through every page, unless you have a very small website,” Ranon told E-Access Bulletin this week.” You have templates and then try to educate content people. This is the largest group exercise we do as a team, and conformance testing with WCAG 2 takes a long time, so it was not practical.”

‘Better Connected’ reviews are carried out in November and December, with all results including accessibility test results due to be published at the end of February 2012.

Some 60% of website owners contacted about accessibility problems by the national ‘FixTheWeb’ project either ignore the contact or “duck the issue”, according to the project’s director. And just 10% take action immediately to fix the problem.

FixTheWeb is a national programme allowing any disabled person encountering accessibility problems online to inform a group of volunteers – now morethan 600-strong – who will pursue the issue with the website owner on their behalf. Volunteers can be contacted using email, Twitter, a web form or a special browser toolbar, allowing anyone to report any web accessibility issue quickly and easily. The project is led by the digital inclusion charity Citizens Online with funding from Nominet Trust.

So far about 700 websites have been reported through the service, Gail Bradbrook, the project’s manager, told the second annual Web Accessibility London Unconference at City University last week. However of these, only about 50 have been fixed by their owners.

In all, 40% of contacts made by volunteers received no response at all, said Bradbrook: “Somebody probably chose to ignore it, unless we got spam filtered.” In a further 20% of cases the volunteers were “fobbed off, with people kind of acknowledging issue but ducking it”, she said, or in some cases showing they had not previously registered the issue of accessibility at all.

Some 30% of people contacted agree they have an accessibility problem and say they can’t deal with it now, but it does matter to them and they will try and address it in future, she said. And in 10% of cases the problem is fixed right away, with half of these needing help to do so.

However even in cases where no response at all is received, the project may be achieving something by raising awareness that accessibility problems exist and that people are noticing them, Bradbrook said.

One of the project’s high points so far came when actor, writer and technology lover Stephen Fry posted a message of support for the campaign, with the resulting PR boost producing its biggest rise in activity to date, she said.

FixTheWeb is currently focused on the UK but is now looking for partners to go global, Bradbrook said. Within Europe, it is already in the process of setting up a key partnership with eAccess+ , a European network of e-accessibility experts.