Well over half of government and council websites
contain coding errors and break usability guidelines for the
disabled.
The University of Southampton said 60% of UK government websites
contained HTML errors and a similar number did not comply with
guidelines aimed at improving web access for the disabled.
A major problem that web developers face is that a large number
of authoring tools do not generate compliant HTML code, making it
difficult to edit the coding.
The university said that even if a website looked fine to most
users, and was free of errors, that did not mean the site would
work with all browsers, and that it would be accessible to visually
impaired people.
The university said web developers should follow guidelines to
make sure websites could be accessed by any browser and on any
sized screen.
The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) recently issued guidance
for web developers to tackle the wider problem of inaccessible
websites.
The DRC said 81% of British websites were inaccessible to
disabled people, so the government sites are not at the bottom of
the scale.
The guidance document, Publicly Available Specification (PAS)
78, has been developed by the British Standards Institution (BSI)
and is sponsored by the DRC.
The PAS 78 guide is applicable to all organisations and is
intended for use by those responsible for commissioning or
maintaining public-facing websites and web-based services.
The document covers six key areas: the accessible website
process, from commissioning to building a site; accessibility
policies; what web accessibility guidelines mean; involvement of
disabled people; compliance checking; and additional useful
accessibility provisions.
Since 1999, website owners have had a legal duty under the
Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) to ensure that services
provided via the web are accessible to disabled people.