What ever happened to Web Accessibility?

For the last week or so, London has been waking up with a daily hangover. Not a hangover caused by the sudden glut of excellent micro-breweries in the city, but one born from feelings of bereavement that the athletes have all gone.

For a couple of months -- first with the Olympics and then with the arrival of the superhumans of the Paralympics -- London was awash with tracksuits and uniforms; both of the teams and the volunteer army that helped the event progress smoothly. Then, in seemingly an instant of the final fireworks echoing across from the east of the city, they were gone. And frankly, we miss 'em.

Much of the justification for the investment in the games was the legacy infrastructure built for the events, not to mention the participation of so many British Olympians and Paralympians in the games themselves. Interestingly with reference to the latter, there was perhaps a further legacy of thinking of accessibility as a primary consideration when building public facilities.

With this in mind I watched with some horror this week  as UK online retailer Ocado told one of its customers that -- in order to use their ecommerce system with a readable text size -- she "try using a bigger screen to fit with our website."

In a chain of emails stretching over several months, the customer -- herself an experienced web developer -- explained that as a result of a recent re-design, the site was largely inaccessible for low-vision users, obscuring many vital site elements, such as the ability to properly select time slots for delivery. 

Ocado, who in their Accessibility Statement state that, "as part of our accessibility work, we also aim to meet Level A of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines," clearly doesn't consider WCAG 2.0 1.4.4 ("text can be resized without assistive technology up to 200 percent without loss of content or functionality") to be of any great importance, what with it being a AA (priority 2) consideration. Indeed, the reported problems with their site actually start with a text zoom of only 120%.

This sort of approach to customer service is obviously boneheaded, both commercially and potentially also, legally. The Equality Act 2010 -- the successor to the Disability Discrimination act -- is sadly a little vague on the specifics of what provision should be made in terms of web accessibility, as the RNIB has noted when they state that it "may be unlawful for a website to: use text, colour contrasting and formatting that make the website inaccessible to a partially sighted service user."

Commercially however, this sort of inaccessibility is almost suicidal. In the UK, with an increasingly elderly population projected to soon form almost 40% of consumers and with 10% of the population as a whole suffering from some form of disability, rejecting the usability concerns of this number of customers is at best, reckless.

Retrofitting web projects to meet accessibility guidelines is a complex and painful business. I know this from difficult personal experience. There is of course a much easier path, which is to actually build in compliance from the beginning, and crucially test it thoroughly with appropriate sets of visitors before you think of putting it live.

If there's one legacy I'd like from the games of 2012, it would be a renewed enthusiasm for building accessible websites and not -- as in the case of Ocado -- aiming so low as to hit only the most-basic level of compliance.


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Gil, Partner, Cancentric Solutions Inc.
iStudio Canada Inc.

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