Is Your Web Site Handicap-Accessible?
Business Week has an important article (also a more recent one from Stores) about the why's and how's of making your web site accessible to people with sight, hearing or mobility impairments.
It seems that the fast pace of development in Web technology over the past few years (technology such as Flash animation, photos, videos, security systems, and spam blockers) have actually made it more difficult for the handicapped to access sites using specialized software, such as screen reading and captioning applications.
But awareness that Web sites must be made accessible is expected to grow, for both legal and practical reasons, such as customer complaints and overseas laws.
A class action suit against Target is currently pending in a California court for failing and refusing to make its site accessible to the blind. This violates both the Americans with Disabilities Act and California law, which requires that all federal Web sites (including those of private-sector firms that are doing business with the federal government) be accessible for the disabled. Most similar cases have thus far resulted in private settlements.
For other private corporations and small businesses online, however, the rules are not quite so clear, as the courts "are having difficulty determining whether or not the Internet is 'a place of public accommodation' under Title 3 of the ADA." States have passed a patchwork of laws that do not always provide clear guidelines, so that many business owners are not aware that their Web sites should be disabled-friendly.
According to the article, it's not that expensive to build accessible sites - all that needs to be done is for the sites to be coded correctly with the right attributes. Besides new customers, there's another benefit to going through this process - text-oriented sites are more search engine friendly. Adding disability access to a large site cost $5,000 to $15,000 and the ROI from SEO can recoup that cost fairly quickly. It's even cheaper if you're in the process of building a site from scratch.
Resources for those looking into this issue include the International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet, The World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative, federal procurement law, Cynthia Says (a free online evaluation tool), and the Global Internet Accessibility blog.
Posted by Universal Ad
It seems that the fast pace of development in Web technology over the past few years (technology such as Flash animation, photos, videos, security systems, and spam blockers) have actually made it more difficult for the handicapped to access sites using specialized software, such as screen reading and captioning applications.
But awareness that Web sites must be made accessible is expected to grow, for both legal and practical reasons, such as customer complaints and overseas laws.
A class action suit against Target is currently pending in a California court for failing and refusing to make its site accessible to the blind. This violates both the Americans with Disabilities Act and California law, which requires that all federal Web sites (including those of private-sector firms that are doing business with the federal government) be accessible for the disabled. Most similar cases have thus far resulted in private settlements.
For other private corporations and small businesses online, however, the rules are not quite so clear, as the courts "are having difficulty determining whether or not the Internet is 'a place of public accommodation' under Title 3 of the ADA." States have passed a patchwork of laws that do not always provide clear guidelines, so that many business owners are not aware that their Web sites should be disabled-friendly.
According to the article, it's not that expensive to build accessible sites - all that needs to be done is for the sites to be coded correctly with the right attributes. Besides new customers, there's another benefit to going through this process - text-oriented sites are more search engine friendly. Adding disability access to a large site cost $5,000 to $15,000 and the ROI from SEO can recoup that cost fairly quickly. It's even cheaper if you're in the process of building a site from scratch.
Resources for those looking into this issue include the International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet, The World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative, federal procurement law, Cynthia Says (a free online evaluation tool), and the Global Internet Accessibility blog.
Posted by Universal Ad
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