John Lewis' website offers its customers the best levels of
accessibility out of the top UK high street retailers, according to
a study released today.
The
2009 Ecommerce Accessibility Report from user experience
consultancy Webcredible shows the John Lewis website topped the
study of 19 leading retailer websites, with a score of 74%.
It moved from 4th to 1st place with a rise of 1% from last year.
The report also revealed that Boots was the outstanding mover
though, having gone from joint 17th place last year to 2nd place
this time, with a score of 72% - an improvement of 35% from the
previous study.
Webcredible's 2009 Ecommerce Accessibility Report also gives
guidance to online retailers and helps them to understand how they
can improve their sites and make them accessible to users with a
broad range of disabilities.
The guidelines that need improvement are much the same as last
year, including: using appropriate alternative text for images, not
embedding text within images so that it can be resized properly,
and providing skip links to get to the main content more
easily.
After only achieving a low average accessibility score of 56.8%
a year ago, the ecommerce industry has seen a general improvement
in accessibility achieving an average score of 61.6% this year.
The main reason for this improvement is that only one retailer
scored lower than 50%, compared to seven in last year's report.
This shows that more top retailers are paying greater attention to
the basics of accessibility, such as descriptive page titles,
headings and links, and text resizing options, said
Webcredible.
Other big improvements were seen with WHSmith climbing from 16th
place to 11th, improving its score from 41% to 61%, and Debenhams,
which climbed from equal 17th to equal 12th place with an
improvement of 19%.
Last year's top three sites, H.Samuel, HMV and B&Q find
themselves in 9th, equal 4th and 6th, respectively in this year's
report.
Currys remained bottom of the list with a score of 37%.
Trenton Moss, director at Webcredible, said, "The average score
for every guideline has improved, but the main reason for dropped
points is still inconsistency, with many retailers applying
accessibility guidelines to some pages but not others."
There are legal requirements for the accessibility of websites
set out by the Disability Discrimination Act.