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.
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.
