MeAC – Measuring Progress of eAccessibility in Europe

Legislation/regulations

The Disability Discrimination Act (1995, updated 2005) seems to be the main legislative basis for website accessibility. The original Act contains provisions to prevent discrimination against disabled people by service providers and requires service providers to make [reasonable adjustments in order to make] services accessible to disabled people. The Code of Practice to part III of the Act gives the example of a website as a service that is covered by the Act.

The DDA Act 2005, amending the 1995 Act, introduced a positive duty on the providers of public websites. This Disability Equality Duty (DED) applies to all public services. The Code of Practice to the Act for government departments gives examples of the procurement of new IT systems and the re-design of a department’s website by external contractors as services to which the DED applies.

Cabinet Office Guidelines for UK Government Websites (non mandatory) have been available for a number of years, providing a best practice framework for guidance on the management of UK government websites. They included targets for public web sites of priority AA of version 1 of W3C guidelines.

In 2007, a specific guidance document “Delivering inclusive websites: user-centred accessibility” was issued by the Cabinet Office’s Central Office of Information (COI). This document sets out the minimum level of accessibility for Government websites and contains practical guidance on how to achieve this. It states that, in order to help fulfil the disability equality duty for web publishing and online service provision, Government website owners should adopt best practice in commissioning accessible websites, as set out in PAS (Publicly Available Specification) 78. The Publicly Available Specification – Guide to Good Practice in Commissioning Accessible websites (PAS-78) is a British standard developed to support public procurement to address web accessibility. It is “applicable to all public and private organizations that wish to observe good practice under the existing voluntary guidelines and the relevant legislation”. With regard to PAS-78, a new technical committee has been assembled in 2008 to oversee the development of a full British standard that is expected to be published in the first quarter of 2009.

The COI guidelines set a minimum level of accessibility:

1. The minimum level of accessibility for all Government websites is Level Double-A of the W3C guidelines. Any new site approved by the Cabinet Sub-Committee on Public Engagement and the Delivery of Service (DA(PED)) must conform to these guidelines from the point of publication.
2. Continuing standalone sites must achieve this level of accessibility by December 2008. Websites which fail to meet the mandated level of conformance shall be subject to the withdrawal process for .gov.uk domain names, as set out in Naming and Registering Websites (TG101).

Although there are no direct legislative or other measures that impose a clear legal requirement on accessibility of private websites, it appears that web site accessibility of commercial services falls within the scope of the DDA (and therefore disabled people can make a claim under the Act if they feel discriminated against because of inaccessibility of a website). The Code of Practice cites an airline website as an example of a relevant service. However, it seems that there is little or no case law on web site accessibility so far, part of the reason for this being the lack of a legal definition of what constitutes an accessible web site.

Other initiatives

The Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) “See it Right Campaign” provides web accessibility audits and evaluations based on the WAI guidelines and awards the See it Right logo to websites that have undergone the audit process and achieved the required standard.
There are also the Mencap Guidelines for web designers ‘Making your website accessible for people with a learning disability’.

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