Accessibility Special: Disability Rights Commission plugs Knowledge Gap with BSI Guidance

The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) has commissioned the British Standards Institution (BSI) to produce new guidance to plug the knowledge gap it identified during its research into website accessibility. The guidance will take the aim of informing website commissioners and developers of their obligations and of good practice in this area. This guidance takes the form of a Publicly Available Specification (PAS).

A PAS is not a full British Standard but is developed using the same rigorous processes. The DRC is supporting a PAS on website accessibility as it can be introduced more quickly than a British Standard which can often take several years to be introduced. The other advantage of supporting a PAS is that it can be updated frequently.

The PAS - 'PAS 78: Guide to good practice in designing accessible websites' - will remind web developers of the vital importance of Web standards. The document will describe the standards that websites should conform to. It will also tackle many of the myths and confusions surrounding web accessibility. For example, the role of automated tools, how to validate the web code, quality assurance and benchmarking, and how and when to involve disabled people in the design lifecycle are all addressed.

The PAS will be developed by a Steering Group of accessibility experts, selected to represent the range of viewpoints involved, and then reviewed by a very broad-based Review Panel. It is due to be published this Autumn. Both the Group and Panel members have already been appointed.

The PAS will be updated every two years as a minimum. It is important that anyone with an interest or direct responsibility for website accessibility follows the good practice contained in the document.

This move from the DRC follows their publication a year ago of the results of a Formal Investigation into the issues that disabled people face when using websites. The DRC's investigation discovered that many disabled people find many websites difficult to use.

The DRC points out that this hasn't always been their experience of the web. Disabled people, including blind and partially sighted people, deaf and hearing impaired people, people with conditions that resulted in limited use of their arms and people with cognitive disabilities, were able to use the Web with relative ease. This was largely due to the creation of access technologies that would, for example, convert web text into audible, synthetic speech that blind people could hear. Access technologies worked relatively faultlessly because most websites were hand-coded using the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML standards.

When Web authoring software tools hit the market, most of them did not produce W3C-compliant code, which meant that the web ceased to be based on standards-compliant mark up. Many disabled people found their access technologies and themselves isolated from a significant number of web services.

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