Access and accessibility in digital: Issues in vogue for the UK

I started off looking up some present trends in digital accessibility but ended with some surprising stats on the UK’s lack of basic digital access that upstaged ‘accessibility’ somewhat.

So, I’ll try to blend the key points from both salient issues although it may involve a bit of leap-frogging on your part. But if you’re part of digital already, that’s par for the course, right?

I’m sure that many of us will do a double take at the focused, hard-nosed approach taken by none other than the Lords Select Committee on Digital Skills. They published their Report, Make or Break: The UK’s Digital Future, on Feb 17th. It actually is easy to read, hard-hitting and sounds sensible. Yes, quite a shock. Suddenly what all of us in digital have all been saying for years has reached a crescendo of warning bells for the UK. Am-Az-Ing! If I just throw out a few tasters from the report, you’ll see what I mean.

• A report by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in 2013, meanwhile, found that the size of the digital economy was almost double official estimates.... Digital technology is pervasive across all aspects of life, so much so that the ‘digital economy’ is becoming synonymous with the national economy.
• Digital skills (the skills needed to interact with digital technologies) are now necessary life skills. ... It is not acceptable for any group to be excluded from access to digital technologies.
• All of this will require universal access to the internet to engage with vital public and personal services. That is why we conclude that the Government should define the internet as a utility service, available for all to access and use.
• The new digital age offers huge opportunities as well as significant risks; it can make the UK, or break it.
• Access to digital technologies
  
  • 49. Objective 1: The population as a whole has unimpeded access to digital technology.
  • 50. This includes:
    
    • facilitation of universal internet access: the internet is viewed as a utility; and
    • removing ‘not-spots’ in urban areas

The BBC News, Digital skills should be core subjects, says the report (17 Feb 2015), highlights the following stats that are pretty shocking. In themselves, they relate to ‘access’ and motivation. No wonder the report is hard-hitting. The Select committee genuinely believe that the UK is at a tipping point that undermines the economic health of the country.

• A digital divide persists in the UK, with some six million citizens never having used the internet and 9.5 million lacking adequate digital skills, partly because they have been "poorly served at school", the report warns.

Well, with such basics as hard infrastructure of access to superfast broadband and soft infrastructure of digital skills in the population under the microscope, you’ll see why I got a bit side-tracked.

So here’s the counterpart about ‘accessibility’ of sites. Once people are accessing sites, they need to be easy and straightforward to use. Again, some stats worth noting are:

• the UK’s 12 million disabled people have a spending power of £120 billion
• accessible sites are 35% more usable by everyone whether they have special access needs or not

Ability Net, Web Accessibility Resources, This site has many pointers to accessibility resources so it’s worth noting.

‘Better Connected’, is a report about the accessibility of council web sites that has been done annually for 17 years. There was a massive dip in performance in 2013 that the report’s originators, Soctim, put down to the poor testing of mobile sites. Soctim uses people with disabilities to test the sites. Many might not understand the range of disabilities that can cause problems with sites such as dyslexia, learning difficulties and poor vision. The Digital Accessibility Centre has a good resources page with some free testing that you might find useful.

This is a larger blog than usual but you can see why. I hope.

Accessibility and the evolving digital arena

The whole concept of accessibility is being questioned and we need to understand what is happening so that we're not caught unaware. We were a bit late applying retro standards to our web sites after legislation about website accessibility in the updated Disability Discrimination Act 1995 called, The Equality Act, 2010. We have kept an eye on the issues in this blog. See some previous posts.

But, there is a sea-change coming: perhaps helped through the positive legacy of the Para-Olympics where overcoming disability was celebrated. Within the last month a report by Kevin Carey commissioned by AbilityNet, Universal Citizen Access, Universal Consumer Access: A New Approach, has upped the anti. The Key Concepts Summaries from Page 29 should give the gist and 7.5 Key Concepts relating to Technology, (Page 31), are as follows:

• Digital information systems should be defaulted to the maximum access state and the simplest information array
• Publishers should adopt uniformity in their displays, taxonomy, terminology, navigation and controls
• Conformity between major publishers is unlikely in the short term, so investment should be in inter-operability applications.

The key change is to redefine disability of access as anything that stops any citizen obtaining the same access to information as a peer group norm. This expands the concern for access radically. It includes age as well as physical impairments. So if extra information is only made accessible by QR (Quick Response) code on the assumption that people will have suitable mobile devices to hand to decode these, or, if—as is happening—large businesses, like banks, are now insisting that statements/information will only be made available electronically, they are mandating some minimal requirements for the customer that can exclude access. Note that restricted access here is not physical and not even age related, but device dependant which is linked to life-style and income. Oh, and just in case, those QR codes are the square matrix designs on ads, packaging, magazines, and in some museums etc. that can give you labels, layers of information and links to other digital environments. They are effectively matrix bar-codes.

In response to Kevin’s report, AbilityNet has launched Mind the Digital Gap, a proposal for a strategic initiative launched at a parliamentary reception at the House of Commons on 21st November. Once the concept of access is expanded to any citizen outside a peer norm, the numbers should ring alarm bells. There are millions of defined registered disabled people just in the UK so yes, we should be taking notice. Imagine asking your clients if they’d mind excluding X million potential customers worldwide from their information.

If you have higher education institutions among your clients then you might be interested in the Mobile Technologies and the Law Overview, by JISC, 19th November, that covers accessibility, as well as copyright issues.

Times, they are a-changing!

Web accessibility and legal requirements update

Accessibility has always been a consideration for websites because if your users can't access the information the website isn't doing its job. But not all users can relate to a website in the same way, perhaps because of physical or educational disability. It used to be that website developers could just try to adhere to the Web Accessibility Initiative embodied in the W3C guidelines, but things have got more complicated.

The DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) has been replaced by The Equality Act 2010 according to the RNIB who are currently suing BMI Baby over poor accessibility of its site.

If you are developing government sites then you might be interested in work done for Broxtowe Council by the Shaw Trust, who employ disabled people and were used to test the council's web site over 60 hours. Broxtowe's site has just won the Shaw Trust Plus Accessibility award.

If you have educational establishments as part of your portfolio, they have extra accessibility issues since they have to consider The Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (2001). Durham University's web page gives some pointers for this area.

If you are developing pharmaceutical sites then you might be interested in the article by Nick Austen and Ben Deebie-Rogers, Legal Issues for Pharmacy Websites, as pharmacists have their own code of practice along with the e-commerce directives for selling online, the distance selling regulations and security data protection issues.

For more general info about legal requirements see The COI (Central Office of Information – but it will close on 31st March). And be aware that ethical requirements as well as legal requirements are beginning to find favour.

Cautionary tales

Two legal items caught my eye this week, and reinforce the care needed when building web sites.

The first is a copyright infringement case heard in the Patents Small Claims Court, which provides a 'low cost' route to justice in intellectual property cases in the UK. In this case (Hoffman v Drug Abuse Resistance Education (UK) Ltd [2012]) a charity web site had included some photographs illustrating types of drug. The web designers and their client believed that the photographs belonged to the UK government (and they had been used on a government drug information site) and as a result could be used on this web site. Unfortunately this was not the case as they were copyright of a long-established photojournalist named David Hoffman and no permission had been given for their use in this way.

The photographer successfully took action for copyright infringement against the charity who published the web site and the judge calculated and awarded damages. The judgement is clearly set out and makes useful and interesting reading.

In the book we recommend that you don't necessarily believe it when your client says that assets are cleared for their web site. You are probably aware that most contracts that involve clearance of assets include some kind of indemnity and that this, in turn, should be covered by professional indemnity insurance. I should add that if whoever had used Mr Hoffman's photos originally had included correct rights metadata with the image this whole show could have been avoided. So that's another good reason for making sure images on your web sites have appropriate metadata.

A few days ago the RNIB initiated legal action against the bmibaby airline over accessibility (or lack thereof) on their web site. Apparently this has been ongoing for some time and the impression I get is that the RNIB felt the airline had been given enough time to fix the accessibility issues but there had been no progress.

I suspect many of us thought that accessibility was no longer the problem it was a few years ago and that the basic techniques were now common practice. In any event, with more and more web sites using content management systems the feeling would be that the CMS would do the heavy lifting on accessibility as it does on other things. Clearly we, and our clients, should not get complacent.

Accessibility in the mobile arena

It took years for the interactive industry to recognise and implement web sites that conformed to accessibility guidelines for disadvantaged people due to physical or learning impairments - many would argue that this still hasn't happened and lots of web sites are still impenetrable for disadvantaged users. However, at least guidelines exist and research been done so that when and if clients demand accessible sites, your designers can demonstrate compatibility and you can build the requirements into the Time, Cost, Quality spec.

What about mobile? In many ways the development of mobile offerings has been experimental, entrepreneurial - in the spirit of interactive communication development, you might say. And after finding out how, when, and what to offer in the mini interactive environments on the mobile devices, and then how successful they have been, everyone wants a part of the action. There's no stronger motivation than feeling left out!

So it'll be no surprise that the guidelines for mobile are coming! Watch this space. But don't worry. You need to deal with these as you have web accessibility guidelines. The ones that become legal requirements you must heed and educate your clients that you have to operate in this way. The voluntary guidelines will depend on your client, their ethics, and their market requirements. All you need to do is ask the right questions at the right time in the project start-up and work out the implications for time, cost and quality. Perhaps time to revise your scoping questionnaire?

What's happening then? In mid October the UK government convened a forum of experts to address the issues of interactive accessibility and making services more inclusive. This will have implications for web and mobile.

The well known web accessibility initiative, W3.org , is already addressing mobile accessibility issues.

The RNIB, renowned for championing web accessibility for its sector, offers useful resources for its members about the use of mobile on its site. They are useful for us to note too.

Finally, yes, the phone operators themselves have some initiatives for disadvantaged customers – such as Vodafone, who will concentrate on two strategies. The first will look at assistive products and services, and the second Inclusive design.

Our strategic objective by March 2011 is to offer an option that makes access to telecommunications possible for hearing impaired, visually impaired and elderly customers in each of our markets

Benefits of web sites for businesses

In our scoping questionnaire we suggest that you ask your clients what benefits they want from their web site in order to help you define the functionality needed and to be able to prove that you have achieved what was wanted once you have created a site.
You can of course take a more pro-active stance and list the benefits your clients might achieve and then ask which of them they want. It is always easier if someone else has defined items and you select appropriate ones, don't you think?

With this in mind then, here’s a list of possible benefits. You should present price tag increases for the more options your clients chose.

An Online presence allows:

• Improved communications
• Access to information 24/7
• Improved efficiency
• Opportunities for new business
• More close contact with customers
• More close contact with suppliers
• Online recruitment for your company
• After sales service
• Enlarged market reach
• Marketing new products/offers to suit the customers

Selling online allows:

• A Global marketplace
• Direct selling - no middlemen
• 24 Hour business - If your web site can process payment information you can be open 24 hours a day!
• Increased customer information therefore reduced information distribution costs

Accessibility issues can add more benefits too.

Now it isn't just about the web site. Blogs, Social Media site presence and mobile resources can add more of those intangible benefits like street cred, urgency, emerging trends, personality cults, opinion waves, hype and so on. For more on accessibility benefits see Granite5 7th June 2010 or econsultancy 9th March 2010. For more on the benefits of blogging see Webbiquity 21st June 2010.

Maybe it is time to review your list of benefits of your online offerings for your clients to make your scoping easier?