Accessibility: Not Such a Bitter Pill

Enforced standards to make corporate websites accessible to disabled people could actually pave the way for cost savings and profit improvements.

Accessibility: “Making allowances for characteristics a person cannot change, or cannot change easily.”
Joe Clark, accessibility specialist and speaker at @Media, London, June 2005.

Over the last 18 months, the world's IT press has gradually been waking up to the fact that, for whatever reason, companies must now make their internet and intranet content accessible to everyone. The requirement is very real. Despite a multitude of incorrect articles published on the details, the one thing everyone is in agreement about is that UK business owners and managers must address this 'accessibility' issue.

The picture that is painted is usually one of doom and gloom. Accessibility is generally presented as a mandatory requirement that will cost you money to implement, but is something you just have to do. Occasionally, articles will mention the size of the market that might benefit, and conclusions are sometimes drawn about the lost sales at stake if you do nothing.

The problem with this type of argument is that firstly there are few case studies out there to prove that the conclusions are true. Secondly, most businesses argue (incorrectly!) that, of course, disabled people couldn't possibly want a bicycle, a car, a holiday in the sun, an outsourced IT contract, or whatever their specific market offering is. And even if they did, it's just a minority share, not worth the hassle of including them in the marketing mix at this point in time.

But companies need to consider whether accessibility, and the use of so-called web standards that accessibility implies, is truly the overhead that it is made out to be. What if it could be demonstrated that implementing a standards-compliant accessible internet and intranet actually positively affects the bottom line, irrespective of whether anyone happened to benefit in the process? If this were true, businesses would be keen to implement changes to reduce cost, which is a far simpler boardroom discussion, and thus a far sweeter pill to swallow.

This article presents a summary of the reality of the accessibility situation in the UK today, in an attempt to clear up some of the misconceptions that have permeated in the past months. It also attempts to explain the benefits that can be realised through migration of an internet or intranet site or application to standards-compliant technologies. It is hoped that this will be used as a starting point for organisations to put together a fairer picture of the upside to changing – thus allowing earlier initiation of such projects, and ultimately earlier realisation of the benefits.

What the law says

The number one reason for change has to be that this action is mandatory. The UK is one of the few countries in the world which actually has fairly unambiguous disability discrimination legislation, the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 (DDA). There is also a code of practice published about how the act should be interpreted, which specifically and explicitly states that websites are covered by the act's jurisdiction.

Yet there has been much misinformation published in recent months, by eager editors failing to check their facts before pushing out the copy. As a result, many people are unclear about what has changed, and when, and what aspects of business are covered by the changes.

You may have heard about the 31 October 2004 changes. TV adverts publicised these regulations to businesses, encouraging companies to assess their requirements. The changes only actually affected physical access, and didn't have any bearing on website accessibility. Nevertheless, the UK IT and business press wrote about how this would mean that thousands of companies in the UK would have to change their websites to provide their content in a format that would be accessible to everyone.

Well, the good news for businesses is that there is no greater obligation to change their external communications now than there was before the October 2004 amendments came in. The bad news, if it is to be called that, is that the obligation to provide accessible content came in with the Act itself in 1995, and was further clarified in the code of practice published in May 2002.

So why are we not all in a mad panic to change our sites? And why are we not all facing prosecution for our inaccessible content? There are a number of reasons for this. While inaccessible content is technically against the law, there has never been a case brought in the UK. Businesses know this, and are not really taking this threat of prosecution seriously.

More serious, especially for larger businesses, is the threat of damage to reputation that a press story like this might bring. Yet many actually believe that such press coverage could be beneficial to some businesses (all news is good news). The RNIB has been adopting a pragmatic approach, assisting blind individuals to bring cases, but where the business concerned is prepared to change, the case is settled out of court, and the name of the company is kept secret. So far every business has committed to change.

And the law itself (reasonably, you might argue) doesn't force organisations to make changes overnight. The reality is that if you can prove that your organisation is making reasonable efforts to fix the problems with your sites, you will probably be complying with your requirements. Practically, what this means is that you have to have a plan in place, and be seen to be making some progress along that plan. But once this project is in place, you have a reasonable chance of avoiding prosecution if you respond positively to people attempting to access your content.

(For a good summary of how the DDA affects websites, see the Association of Accessibility Professionals website: href://www.accessibilityprofessionals.org/articles/dda.html. If you wish to get it from the horse's mouth, the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) website has links to the relevant legislation itself, on its law page: http://www.drc-gb.org/thelaw/. The DRC has indicated that it will at some point take a stronger line with businesses that are failing in their obligations, but it has yet to bring a case against anyone.)

Why bother?

If the law's no threat, why do anything? Let's start with the obvious one. It's the right thing to do. One might hope that companies will feel a social responsibility to help those who find a traditional computer, screen, keyboard and mouse difficult or impossible to use. But do businesses feel it enough to transform social responsibility into corporate responsibility? The larger the company, the less likely it is that persuading one or two individuals will be enough. When there are 20 projects competing for the annual slice of budget, it's easy to see why a philanthropic endeavour is likely to lose out.

So why else might you consider doing something? A less altruistic, but equally valid, reason is that doing the right thing makes good marketing sense. A sound ethical policy can be used as a weapon to build that elusive brand loyalty and market differentiator that is critical to an organisation when margins are tight and competitors are offering similar services.

Furthermore, the oft-quoted warning against ignoring the disabled market is truer than many might realise. The standard figures (which might be quite impressive on their own, if you're new to them) is that there are over 9.8 million disabled people in the UK, equating to a buying power of somewhere between £17 billion and £120 billion, depending on whose numbers you read! Either way, it's a big market.

However, taken in isolation, these numbers rather undersell the opportunity. What about the thousands of people who struggle on, without registering their disability? What about those who find your site difficult to use, or understand, and who quit before you get them where you want them (reading your proposition, buying your product)? What about the swathes of the UK population for whom reading small letters becomes harder and harder as they get older? And since we are talking about B2B environments, what is the typical profile of the person with the buying power in a company? Yep, they're getting on a bit, aren't they? Do you occasionally wish we'd use a tiny bit larger font sometimes? (How are you finding this document?!)

This is the often unappreciated fact about implementing accessibility on websites. If you make content accessible for the minority, you often make it much easier for the rest of your user base!

Bandwidth costs

So meeting the obligatory requirements doesn't just mean a one-sided project of cost to meet regulatory requirements. If you take the opportunity, you can improve customer relations, build brand image, and impact the top-line sales figure.

Yet there is another even more compelling reason why you should bother. Building web standards-compliant applications and websites can decrease your bandwidth costs by astounding amounts. Figures of up to 90% reduction have been achieved by real companies in real-world applications, and a 60% drop in the size of an average web page is quite typical. With more advanced techniques, further reductions are possible.

Bandwidth is the amount of data that is transferred down a connection or connections, and reducing bandwidth is a key factor in driving down your company's IT infrastructure costs.

But what is an organisation's bandwidth cost, in real terms? Is it the £10,000 a year leased line you use for your inter-office data connectivity? Is it just the charge you pay your ISP for hits to your website? In fact, bandwidth is far more pervasive. A global IT organisation recently estimated that close to 90% of its infrastructure costs were due to provision of bandwidth. Yet it's often a well-hidden cost, which takes some finding and quantifying. For example, it includes the cost of all those routers and switches that are required to keep the servers talking to your clients. It's the cost of the banks of servers that are required for performance, when you only actually need two servers for resilience and disaster recovery, if you could reduce the bandwidth demands. It's the mobile phone costs for your remote workers, as they download bloated pages of corporate data while out and about.

This true cost of bandwidth shouldn't be under-estimated. And the adoption of web standards can have a dramatic effect on this cost. (To learn more about web standards, check out the World wide web consortium's website, the home of many internet standards and guidelines: http://www.w3c.org/.) As we speak, the big IT players, in a break with tradition, are all changing their systems to make their products more standards-compliant. Firefox, Opera and other far more standards-compliant browser engines are slowly but surely clawing back the usage percentages from Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE). Microsoft itself has responded, announcing a new version of IE, way before it was originally planning an upgrade.

Actually, Microsoft is going much further than just a new version of IE. In the upcoming months and years, it is overhauling the majority of its current products, to underpin them all with a standards-based framework. Microsoft Office, Sharepoint, CMS, ASP.NET and SQL Server are some of the flagship products that have been scheduled for overhaul. And MSN, the company's worldwide portal, is taking on the challenge, working with its many content providers to raise the accessibility level of its vast quantity of content.

Conclusion

However you look at the topic, the reasons for accessibility and adoption of web standards are compelling. This article doesn't have the space to explore the detail of how these standards are adopted, and the further benefits that people implementing the solution can expect, in terms of reduced maintenance costs and lower long-term site redesign costs. We haven't looked at how content can be written once, but delivered in multiple formats, to browsers, mobile phones, televisions, printers, all automatically, without the traditional conversion overhead. We've ignored that you no longer have to build for every old browser that ever existed, and you can achieve automatic and graceful degradation of a site to suit restricted devices, without having to dumb down the experience for those with a modern standards-compliant browser. We haven't even touched on the semantic web, with semantic mark-up allowing users to find, rather than search. But it's all exciting, its all possible now, and makes the case all the stronger.

The world is waking up to the power that companies have available to build compelling websites and applications that deliver content to anyone who wishes to receive it, in a format that makes it easy for them. The sooner companies do that, the earlier they will reap the rewards.