Website Accessibility Standards Information

Offering Your Website Accessibility to All Your Ecommerce Customers - There are lots of people browsing the web who are partially sighted, or completely blind, who use various tools to interpret the web page for them – such as a 'screen reader' which literally reads out the content of a page. In order for screen readers to work, a page must comply with a set of guidelines.

The most important set of website accessibility guidelines is published by the 'World Wide Web Consortium' (http://www.w3.org/) and is called the 'Web Content Accessibility Guidelines'.

Our ecommerce stores comply with ALL the 'Priority 1' guidelines provided by the W3C, and most of the others as well. There are a few guidelines that our stores cannot comply with (such as only using HTML tables for tables of data, and not just for layout) as there is no way to make the stores work without them. The 'Bobby' scheme is an opt-in approval scheme run in the UK where sites can have a little badge on their site showing they are 'Bobby Approved' – and therefore accessible to all web browsers. Bobby uses the 'Web Content Accessibility Guidelines' provided by W3C to verify whether a site is compatible. With our stores, people are allowed to put a logo on their site showing 'Bobby A' – which shows that the site complies with the W3C's Priority 1 guidelines.

The relevant sections from the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act 1999) are as follows: 5.23 (p71): “For people with visual impairments, the range of auxiliary aids or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that services are accessible might include ... accessible website's.” 5.26 (p68): “For people with hearing disabilities, the range of auxiliary aids or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that services are accessible might include ... accessible website's.” So, there is no specific information provided by the government to help web site designers. However, it is widely accepted that if a site can be shown to be compliant with the Priority 1 guidelines from the W3C (or the 'A' standard from Bobby) that your site can be considered accessible.