INTRODUCTION:
Can your website be used by ALL visitors? Are you preventing partially-sighted surfers from using your services by having a website which 'breaks' in a speaking browser? Not only are you failing to gain business from a sizeable section of the community, but you may also be considered to be discriminating against visitors with disabilities.

UK LEGISLATION:
The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) makes it unlawful for a provider of services to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing or deliberately failing to make its services available to disabled people. In Section 21 of this Act, a duty is placed on those providing services to the public to make reasonable adjustments so that disabled people can access the services - whether the service is paid-for or free. Websites, whether selling products and services or providing information can be considered as being covered by the DDA and recent media coverage has already focussed on site-owners whose pages 'fall foul' of accessibility guidelines being targeted for action by the Authorities.

THE PROBLEM:
Many websites may be perfectly legible and well-designed when viewed 'normally', but are difficult or in some cases actually impossible to surf using a 'non-standard' browser. Some surfers with disabilities may use a speaking browser, which reads the text content of a site, or may need to view using high contrast on-screen colours or large size text. Websites which have been designed without these considerations in mind (possibly the vast majority of pre-legislation layouts) will fall foul of the new guidelines. Those sites relying heavily on Flash content, animated navigation, or even with an inconsitent hyperlink layout or lack of image descriptions would also 'break the rules'.

In an ideal situation, existing sites would need to be totally overhauled or redesigned, taking these accessibility issues into account. At least, a complete text-only version of the site would need to be created so that visitors would be able to 'opt out' of the regular graphics intensive version. In many cases, either of these options may prove to be impractical - either from a financial or logistical viewpoint.

A FAST COST-EFFECTIVE SOLUTION:
Using software developed by BBC Education in conjunction with the RNIB, which runs on a server independent of your own website, we can provide a fast, cost-effective way to display a complete text-only version of your site (in fact up to three websites) just by placing a single hyperlink on any page!

• No need to even create any text-only version pages
• No need to update any text-only content
• Provide visitors with the ability to match the page display to their own needs
• Add further value to existing W3C compliant sites
• Take problematic content from pages automatically
• Address multiple browser accessibility issues
• Provide a fast alternative site for PDAs and low-resource browsers
• Reduce ongoing webdesign costs
• Just £25 setup and £25 pa for a basic account

Find out more...