• Swindon & Wiltshire Tech
• Wednesday August 28 2024
• Author Name: Peter Davison

Inaccessible websites could fall foul of new law – warning

Businesses whose websites are not accessible to people with disabilities could fall foul of a new EU law coming into force in 2025, according to creative agency Milk & Tweed.

The new law will affect organisations and firms trading in Europe or supplying to companies there.

Websites failing to take account of visual or physical disabilities or additional learning needs are unusable by the one-in-five UK working-age adults living with a disability, says Milk & Tweed web designer Joe Parker, who is part of a team specialising in accessible websites.

“Making your website accessible is a good thing to put in place because you’re allowing more users to access the web and provide a better experience,” he said.

“But if you’re talking about one in five users unable to use your website, you’re cutting off a fifth of your potential customers.”

He and fellow designer Matt Bagley go to painstaking lengths to ensure websites they build are usable and understandable by anyone with a disability.

Everything from the structure governing how pages are laid out to colours and typography have to be considered carefully.

A person who is blind or with severely restricted vision will use a screen reader, a programme that reads all the text on a site out aloud, or interprets into braille, but also needs descriptive text embedded into website to allow it to describe pictures, video, graphics and forms.

People with hearing difficulties need captions on video or audio, while people with visual impairments such as colour blindness or with dyslexia struggle with colours that don’t contrast well.

Users with physical disabilities may be unable to use a computer mouse or click on a phone screen so the website has to be designed in such a way a keyboard’s tab key can be used to navigate it. A screen reader also relies on the tab key.

“The designer will be coding the site in a way that the user can scroll through using their tab key to navigate the site,” said Joe.

“If it is set up correctly, with a logical page structure, the user is not going to get lost in the process.

“It’s just making sure extra thought is put in place for any information that people using screen readers may need, such as instructions.

“Instructions to complete a task should not rely on sound, shape, size or visual location. Descriptive links using generic link text like “learn more” and “click here” provide no context to screen readers. So all links should therefore make sense when read in isolation.”

All web designs should abide by the guidelines set by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), first developed in the 1990s by World Wide Web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee to make web content accessible.

It is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a global community of experts and internationally recognised by governments and organisations.

The WCAG guidelines have been adopted by the European Accessibility Act, which says all websites of companies trading within the EU or supplying to companies within it, even if they are based outside, must reach its standards.

The act is enforceable from June 2025 and the EU says companies found to be in breach face severe fines and have their sites closed down.

“No one knows how strictly the laws will be enforced,” said Joe. “But whatever happens it makes good business sense for every company to review their site and make it compliant.”