The findings are from a survey of the sites of FTSE 100 companies, carried out by digital design company Nomensa.
Disabled access is about making web sites usable by those with disabilities such as sensory, cognitive or mobility problems. A visually impaired internet user can use a screen reader to translate the contents of web pages for speech synthesisers or Braille displays; but the user will struggle to understand web pages if, for example, images are displayed on the page without a text alternative (which can be provided in HTML by an ALT tag).
Nomensa found no sites that achieved a higher rating than the minimum accessibility level defined by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, known as Level A.
According to Nomensa, only 41% of sites provided alternative text for all images, while only 56% of the alternative text used was actually correct. Around 62% of sites did not allow the font size to be rescaled, which is important for visually impaired users.
A massive 92% of the corporate web sites failed to use access keys properly, if at all, denying users the chance to navigate by means of keyboard shortcuts rather than a mouse, while 99% of web sites did not use valid HTML code in constructing their sites, with the result that many of their web pages are displayed incorrectly in some way – a problem exacerbated when screen readers are employed by disabled users.
Only 7% of the FTSE 100 sites showed a good site structure and layout, according to Nomensa, but on the positive side, 76% of web sites had sufficiently descriptive page titles to satisfy the survey.
The most accessible company web sites, according to the survey, include the Gallaher Group, Prudential, Centrica and HBOS. Bottom of the league were the BOC Group, WM Morrison, Whitbread and Wolseley.
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