(source: www.abilitynet.og.uk)
People with disabilities favour the most accessible websites when using the Internet according to computing and disability website Abilitynet, in a report on the top ten sites favoured by the disabled community.
Over 100 people with disabilities were polled and unsurprisingly this showed that the disabled community use the Internet for exactly the same things as everyone else - for information, shopping, banking and leisure. Importantly, however, they choose to spend their time and money of sites more accessible than their competitors.
The ten polled sites proved on average to be 83% more accessible than online newspaper sites, 69% better than shopping sites, 57% better than airline sites and 22% better than sites in the banking and telecom sectors.
Despite this, several of the ten sites still include significant accessibility barriers. Only 3 sites were awarded the minimum accessibility criteria of 3 stars - www.bbc.co.uk, www.nationwide.co.uk and www.google.co.uk- so vital for effective access for disabled visitors.
The remaining 7 sites fell short of this base level benchmark with www.ebay.co.uk, www.amazon.co.uk, www.guardian.co.uk, www.lastminute.com, www.premierleague.com and www.yahoo.co.uk all achieving a 2 star rating. www.timesonline.co.uk received 1 star.
The message is clear - whilst more accessible sites have a competitive edge there is still a long way to go before disabled people have a completely trouble free experience on the net.
The report's author, Robin Christopherson, AbilityNet's Web Consultancy Manager who is himself blind said " In the UK there are around 1.6million registered blind people, 1.5 million with cognitive difficulties, 6 million with dyslexia and a further 3.4 million who have some problem making use of a standard computer impossible or difficult. In addition there is an increasing number of elderly ' silver surfers' with failing eyesight or arthritis. These potential internet users represent a spending power in excess of £120 billion. The arguments are compelling, whether from a moral, legislative or commercial perspective, suppliers of goods, services and information on the internet are ignoring a highly significant market sector at their peril. Disabled users are seeking the same range of information, goods and services as everyone else and it is no surprise therefore that they visit the same mainstream sites as their able bodied' peers, rather than opting for disability related sites. In almost every case, the sites listed in this top ten sample have competitor sites. What the survey shows categorically is that given a choice, the disabled visitor will opt for a site which is more accessible in preference to others on offer."
Typical problems encountered in this sample include:
* hard coded text so that it is difficult to resize
*absent or uninformative explanations in text labels
*use of pictoral text as opposed to actual text
*adverts and features made up of moving images causing distractions, or inaccessibility to those unable to use a mouse