Does your website comply with the Disability Discrimination Act?

Summary

With the gradual introduction of rights under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (“the Act”), businesses are adjusting their operations to comply with the Act, typically by improving physical access to buildings and services for both employees and customers alike. However, many businesses remain unaware that the duty not to discriminate against disabled persons extends to other areas – including equal access to electronic information and services, such as websites.

Reasonable steps must be taken by website operators to ensure that they do not discriminate against disabled persons. Disability organisations have recommended certain practical steps which can be taken in respect of websites including the use of a text based and frame-free websites, descriptive hyperlinks (not simply “click here”), multimedia having transcripts of audio and video, and descriptions of images.

If a business operates a website which does not comply with the requirements of the Act, not only do they run the risk of facing an action for disability discrimination, but also the associated negative adverse publicity.

Background

Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (“the Act”) imposes a duty on service providers not to discriminate against a disabled person. A service provider includes every person who provides services to the public or to a section of the public, whether in the private, public or voluntary sector, irrespective of whether the service is provided for a charge or not. The Act provides examples of services, which include “access to and use of information services” and “means of communication”: as such, the design and functionality of websites fall within the ambit of the Act and therefore website operators are under a duty to ensure compliance.

Discrimination

The meaning of discrimination in relation to the provision of services is described in section 20 of the Act. In brief, a provider of services discriminates against a disabled person if, without justification,

(i) he treats the disabled person less favourably than he treats others; or
(ii)he has a practice, policy or procedure which makes it impossible or unreasonably difficult for disabled persons to make use of the service, and fails to take reasonable steps to address such obstacles.

Although the Act sets out when discrimination may be justifiable, including incapacity and endangering health or safety, none appears to be relevant in relation to websites.

“Reasonable steps”

Under s.21, service providers must take “such steps as is reasonable, in all the circumstances of the case […]” to remove any discriminatory practice, policy or procedure. The Act does provide some limitation as to the extent to which steps must be taken. The Disability Rights Commission has issued guidance in the updated Code of Practice (Rights of Access – Goods, Facilities, Services and Premises) (“the Code”) The Code indicates that what is a reasonable step for a particular service provider will vary on a case-by-case basis depending on,

• the type of services being provided;
• the nature of the service provider and its size and resources; and
• the effect of the disability on the individual disabled person.

The Code elaborates further and provides a non-exhaustive list of factors to be taken into account when considering what is reasonable:

• whether taking any particular steps would be effective in overcoming the difficulty that disabled people face in accessing the services in question;
• the extent to which it is practicable for the service provider to take the steps;
• the financial and other costs of making the adjustment;
• the extent of any disruption which taking the steps would cause;
• the extent of the service provider’s financial and other resources;
• the amount of any resources already spent on making adjustments; and
• the availability of financial or other assistance.

Although financial constraints may be considered reasonable in respect of certain physical adjustments to buildings etc, it is unlikely that website operators would be able to rely on such a reason as websites evolve with new layouts and new attributes being introduced on a relatively frequent basis: as such, website operators will have little excuse for not taking account of the guidelines in their second and third generation websites.

Practical steps for compliance

Although there are no hard and fast rules for compliance with the Act, guidance on design can be taken from the Code and the recommendations issued by disability organisations such as Royal National Institute for the Blind and by the international internet body, the World Wide Web Consortium In summary,

• Text and colours The text should be easily legible, and the fonts should be changeable. A plain background is preferable to contrast with the text. Patterned backgrounds should be avoided, as they are difficult to read.
• Images and animations All images should have attributed text to allow speech synthesisers, which read text aloud to visually impaired users, to describe the image to disabled users
• Multimedia Provide transcripts of audio and descriptions of video
• Scripts, applets and plug-ins Although they provide a more sophisticated interface, they also impede software which assists disabled users accessing the web
• Hyperlinks Descriptive hyperlinks are more beneficial than non-descriptive “click here” hyperlinks.
• Frame or frame-free? If frames are used on your website, provision should be made for an option to use a frame-free version as many speech synthesisers packages are unable to read frames.
• Check the website The Centre for Applied Special Technology has a free online tool called, Bobby which conducts an instant and automated review of a website and highlights design problems that may cause problems for disabled users.
• Consider an additional purely text based website Tesco.com provides an alternative text-based only homepage as an alternative to its principal “all-singing all dancing” homepage: this specific homepage contains links to the entire tesco.com website in an easy to access and navigate text format. This is not only of benefit to people with disabilities, but also to internet users who access the web over a slow connection (text downloads much faster than images).

Conclusion

The Act seeks to create a level playing field in the provision of services so that all persons are able to benefit from services without regard to disability. Given that the internet is a flexible and evolving medium, website operators should undertake to conduct an audit of their websites to assess accessibility and develop the design in light of recommendations and guidelines. Although the threat of legal action for disability discrimination should provide the necessary impetus for change, the commercial advantages should not be overlooked: by improving accessibility not only sends out a positive image about an organisation, but equally it ensures that more users (and therefore potential clients) are able to benefit from the services offered on the website.

For further information, please contact John Armstrong by telephone on +44 (0) 20 7367 2701 or by e-mail at [email protected], or David Roberts by telephone on +44 (0) 20 7367 3678 or by email at [email protected] or Simon Moran by telephone on +44 (0) 20 7367 3680 or by e-mail at [email protected]