The following article was written for OUT-LAW by Chris
Rourke.
The landscape of web accessibility is slowly changing. On 8th
March the British Standards Institute (BSI) released the Publicly
Available Specification (PAS) 78 entitled 'Guide to good
practice in commissioning accessible websites'. This document, the
result of about a year of hard work from Julie Howell of the
RNIB, in
consultation with others working in the world of web accessibility,
is a great step forward in achieving the goal of more accessible
websites.
In my view the most important aspect of it is not the content of
the document; it is the intended audience. It is primarily
aimed at people who commission websites, although it
certainly needs to be understood by those who actually
build sites since it describes the level of competence
which they may be asked to demonstrate.
As opposed to the WCAG, which is aimed
primarily at web designers and developers, PAS 78 describes the
management process that a website commissioner should follow to
ensure that whoever they get to build their site has the skills and
resources to make it accessible.
In short it will make it a lot easier to answer a question we
hear frequently: "I know that accessibility is really important,
and that there are guidelines, but how do I make sure that the
people we are thinking of giving our site redesign to know enough
about accessibility to give us a good, accessible site?"
We can now just refer them to PAS 78 which has a section about
contracting web design and accessibility auditing services. It's a
set of questions to help separate the coders from the cowboys of
web design, and reveal those who are merely aware of accessibility
as an issue but do not apply accessibility in their projects.
It also has a clear roadmap that the site commissioner and
developer should follow throughout, including a recommended step of
actually testing the site with disabled users. This extra step, to
get empirical evidence of potential accessibility issues and help
avoid the 'box ticking' attitude to accessibility, is one that will
certainly test the abilities and resources of many development
companies that gave cursory efforts to accessibility.
Accessibility survey
If you have been working on accessibility for your site, we'd
value your input on a short survey on how you went about meeting
your accessibility goals. This survey on
SurveyMonkey should only take about five minutes to complete
and we'd be glad to share the results with you if you can
contribute.
Chris Rourke is a director of User Vision, based
in Edinburgh.
