Lemon Foundation

Web design is constantly changing and evolving and the increased use of rich media, videos in banners and social networking sites have created new usability and accessibility issues which have implications for web design.

Companies that want to provide their users with a rich brand experience have a problem, in that many disabled users may be unable to use the full range of content on their sites.

There are around 8.6m people, or around 14% of the UK population,  who are registered as disabled in the UK and 3.4m have disabilities which prevent them from using the standard keyboard, screen and mouse set-up.

This means that many companies are potentially excluding a large amount of potential users from their websites - a 2004 Disability Rights Commission report found that 81% of UK websites failed to meet the most basic levels of accessibility.

As well as the number of potential users who would miss out, there are some other reasons why web designers need to consider accessibility when designing a new site:

• Many people use less popular browsers – Internet Explorer may be the dominant browser, but other browsers are used by the visually impaired and other internet users.
• Increased traffic from search engines – techniques used to make sites more accessible, such as clearer navigation and text alternatives for images can have the added benefit in helping your SEO.
• Legal requirements – The UK and many other countries have legal requirements to make websites accessible. Providing accessible websites is a requirement of the Disability and Discrimination Act, required by law from 2002. In the 2002 code of practice there is a legal requirement for websites to be accessible. This is particularly important for sites which provide a service, such as travel or financial websites.
  

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) highlights a number of common accessibility problems:

“Images without alternative text; lack of alternative text for imagemap hot-spots; misleading use of structural elements on pages; uncaptioned audio or undescribed video; lack of alternative information for users who cannot access frames or scripts; tables that are difficult to decipher when linearised; or sites with poor colour contrast.”

The recent boom in user-generated content presents many such problems. Content on blogs, social networks and video sites is often updated so rapidly that it is virtually impossible for the sites to monitor the accessibility of that content.

Recent innovations also have implications for usability – Ajax is one example. It provides a more advanced user interface that doesn’t have to refresh the page for every change made by the user, but causes problems for users of some browsers and screen readers.

When such innovations clearly benefit and increase usability and the online experience for many internet users, rich media, videos and other interactive content is very difficult to make accessible.

It may be that, in some cases, while web designers need to take account of accessibility issues as much as they can, sometimes it may be necessary to produce content and advertising which is not suitable for a proportion of the population.

While accessibility will always be an issue in the case of user-generated content, in other cases, the only solution may be to provide an alternative accessible version of the web page in question.