Accessibility Special: UK Council Sites found to make false Claims

Almost a quarter of UK council websites are making false claims about their accessibility to people with disabilities, research by E- Government Bulletin has found.

Accessibility is measured against the international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from the World Wide Web Consortium (http://www.w3.org/WAI). These specify three levels of
compliance: 'A', 'AA' and 'AAA'.

Research into the accessibility of council sites by the Royal National Institute of the Blind, published in March by the local government Society of IT Management, found that of the 468 UK council websites, just 62 met level 'A' standards, and none achieved higher levels.

However, subesequent research by E-Government Bulletin into a sample of 68 sites found widespread claims of 'A', 'AA' and 'AAA' accessibility, by the display of official WCAG logos on the sites, contradicting what the RNIB's expert testers had found.

Nine councils in the sample claimed 'AAA' accessibility for part or all of their sites at the time of testing, even though the RNIB found that seven of these sites did not even reach single 'A' accessibility, and the other two were are only single 'A' sites. A further three claimed 'AA' where RNIB found them to not even meet 'A', and six claimed 'A' status where only two were entitled to do so - a total of 16 false claims in the sample, or 23.5%.

E-Government Bulletin cites Donna Smillie, who heads the RNIB's web accessibility team, as saying: 'The biggest problem is that it devalues the logos - if a site is claiming a certain level people won't trust it, because more often than not they don't comply.' She said one possible reason for the discrepancies could be that councils are simply running automated checks for accessibility, when additional manual checks are needed to ensure a site qualifies.

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