Out-Law News 3 min. read

Newspaper web sites fail on disabled access


The web sites of the UK's ten most widely read newspapers are failing to meet minimum accessibility standards on their web sites, effectively barring millions of disabled people, and potentially breaking the country's Disability Discrimination Act.

The findings are from a survey published this month by national computing and disability charity AbilityNet.

The ten on-line newspapers were audited and checked for accessibility using a comprehensive series of both manual and automated tools. But not one of them satisfied the criteria required to facilitate access for users with visual impairment, dyslexia or those with a physical disability making mouse use difficult.

Thus, says AbilityNet, the selected publications – the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the Daily Mirror, the News of the World, the Daily Telegraph, the Sun, the Times, the Daily and Sunday Express and the Daily Mail – are preventing up to 15% of the population from enjoying the benefits of accessing news and current affairs on-line.

The Guardian's site emerged as the most accessible, but in company with the Daily and Sunday Express site, it could only manage a two-star rating on a five-star scale and still fails to meet a base level of accessibility.

The remaining eight sites were given a single star rating and dubbed "very inaccessible" by AbilityNet, with the Sun and the News of the World deemed to have "the most serious issues of accessibility of all those tested."

Much of the Sun's and the News of the World's sites' content and critical functionality, the AbilityNet report notes, depend on pictures which are also links to other pages.

The 'tool tips' upon which blind visitors and text browser users rely as spoken descriptions of pictures, were virtually absent from both sites. Without 'tool tips' both the images and the links are invisible and the end user excluded as a result.

In addition, pictures of text have been used instead of actual text. This not only means that the user cannot modify font size or colour contrast – essential for those with visual impairment or dyslexia – it also prevents screen reader users from reading the content as these images do not carry 'tool tips' either.

Other drawbacks common to most of the sites tested include reliance on JavaScript, a type of programming code built into a web page and often not recognised (and therefore rendered unreadable) by many older browsers, or some specialist browsers used by those with vision impairment.

Although not usually critical to the functionality of the site as a whole, it still excludes many users from this content. The FT site, for instance, depends on JavaScript to display both stock information and advertisements.

Finally, the text size on most sites has also been 'hard-coded' so that it cannot be enlarged – so vital for many visitors who have vision impairment.

There is a potential market of 1.6 million registered blind users as well as a further 3.4 million with disabilities in the UK, according to the charity HumanITy. Preventing them from using the standard keyboard, screen and mouse set-up with ease, e-businesses are losing out on some £50 - £60 billion per year, says AbilityNet.

"As this survey shows," say the authors, "many disabled people are also being excluded from the benefit of up-to-the-minute on-line information and current affairs provided by our top newspapers."

The charity continues, "For many disabled people, especially those with restricted mobility and/or visual impairment, access to the news on-line is an important way of staying in touch and abreast of the knowledge that most of us take for granted."

Robin Christopherson, AbilityNet's Web Consultancy Manager, who is himself blind, added:

"All the newspaper companies involved in the present survey were contacted a month before and then again immediately prior to the publication of the results. They were asked to make a public commitment to improving the accessibility of their sites and, to date, only The Guardian has taken this important decision – a step which we welcome unequivocally."

While there are commercial and ethical reasons for making web sites accessible, there is also a legal reason: any site that fails to meet basic standards of accessibility is taking a risk of breaching the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995.

For more about this law, see our guide: Disabled access to web sites under UK law

AbilityNet's full report can be downloaded as an 8-page PDF.

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