Are you being surfed?

A new web access standard should make life easier for disabled surfers, but it could be 20 years before the internet is truly accessible. Sunil Peck reports

For all those disabled people who miss out on offers for cheap flights or groceries because of inaccessible websites, help could be at hand.

There is a whole range of problems that can make sites inaccessible: the failure to have text versions of audio content for users with hearing impairments; poor page layout, causing navigation problems for people with learning difficulties; and users who can’t activate links because they don’t use a mouse.

And these kind of web access problems are not confined to the leisure and retail sectors. A 2008 survey by Socitm, an association for IT professionals in local government, found that only 37 out of 468 local authority websites met the basic accessibility standards drawn up by the World Wide Web Consortium's web accessibility initiative (WAI) in 1999.

Now BSI British Standards, which works with industry, consumers and the government to promote best practice, is developing a new national standard for website developers which it hopes will lead to a more inclusive web.

The current guidelines of the WAI were drawn up years before the growth of social networking and e-commerce sites, which often rely on sophisticated multimedia technology that disabled users can struggle with.

The new standard will build on guidance drawn up in 2006 by the BSI and the Disability Rights Commission, known as PAS 78.

The chair of the committee drawing up the new standard is Julie Howell, the web accessibility campaigner. She says standardisation will mean access is at the forefront of a developer’s mind during the design and construction of a website.

“There is a lot that we want to tell web developers and commissioners about commissioning the appropriate web designers, how to involve disabled people in the user-testing process and all the elements to consider when producing a website,” she says.

The new standard will also help developers unsure of which of the various sets of guidelines they should follow.

But the standard will not be mandatory, so what incentive will there be for web developers to adopt it?

The main incentive will be financial, with businesses potentially able to reach millions of disabled consumers, but Howell says they will need to market the standard once it is published.

“A frustration of mine with PAS 78 was that it was published and there was not very much effort to raise awareness of it,” she says. “I hope we will not make that mistake this time.”

The new standard is due to be published in the first quarter of 2009. Howell insists that it will not become outdated, because BSI can update standards after they are published.

Awareness of access needs will become more important as the population ages and people develop impairments that impact on their ability to use the web. But she says it could be 20 years before web developers include disabled people as a matter of course and the internet is truly accessible.