Q: Does My Website Have To Be Accessible in 2009?
“You now have a legal obligation - following the implementation of section 21 of the Disability Discrimination Act (1999) - to make reasonable adjustments to ensure blind and partially sighted people can access your service.”
You do have a responsibility, whether or not you are the designer or the commissioner of the website, to ensure your website design does not discriminate against disabled visitors to your site.
Q: So What Happens if you’re Website Design Is Not Accessible?
Unsurprisingly, you leave yourself open to criticism, bad press and more seriously legal action if your site is not accessible.
“A disabled person can make a claim against you if your website makes it impossible or unreasonably difficult to access information and services. If you have not made reasonable adjustments and cannot show that this failure is justified, then you may be liable under the Act, and may have to pay compensation and be ordered by a court to change your site.”
Q: What Do I Need to Know?
Basically, you need to make sure your site is built to W3C standards for good website design. That means valid html and valid css. It means passing Priority 1 W3C WCAG (Google it!) at least. It means well formed website code (i.e. without errors) and simple and correct use of technologies. Actually - this is fairly simple to do for an experienced web designer - do not accept that you need to pay more for accessible web design - it should come as standard, part of good practice web design. If someone contacts you about the inaccessibility of your web site - then fix it by calling in ivso.
There's a business case and moral obligation to make your site as accessible as you can. There are over 8 Million people registered as having a disability in the UK, and a lot of them use the net - do you really want to ignore them? Prosecutions have been successful in Australia and the US - it will happen in the UK, just not any time but soon.