How accessible are the high street websites

By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research
Published: 7th January 2008
Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

Webcredible, a web usability and accessibility consultancy based in London, has just published a survey of the accessibility of 20 of the top UK retailers. For the record the top five were: H. Samuel, HMV, B&Q, John Lewis and Argos, all with scores in the 70s, and the bottom five were: Currys, Early Learning Centre, Debenhams, Boots and WH Smith, with scores below 41.

The results indicate that some companies now understand the importance of accessibility whilst others have still not got the message. The message is that accessibility is important because:

Social responsibility includes supporting people with disabilities.
The disabled population of the UK has an estimated combined spending power of up to £80 billion.
Internet shopping will often be easier and more convenient than bricks-and-mortar shopping.
Sites designed to be accessible to people with disabilities have been shown to be more usable, leading to an increased spend on the site. See Massive business case for accessibility.
It is the law.

But what is most interesting about the report is the description of the methodology. Each site is given a score (0-5) for each of twenty best practice guidelines giving a maximum score of 100.

The 20 guidelines are not a complete set of requirements for accessibility but a site that followed all 20 would be an excellent site. Interestingly several of the guidelines go beyond the W3C WCAG V1 guidelines, for example ‘skip to main content link' is one of the guidelines.

The guidelines are described with examples taken from the 20 websites. They are easy to understand and the benefits are clear. I would recommend this report to anyone who is interested in creating accessible websites. The report is delivered as a pdf document and it is good to see that it is also accessible.

Reader Comments

Posted: 11th January 2008 | By DrUnKenMonkey :

How accessible is Web 2.0? I see many AJAX driven websites - surely these cannot be accessible? How would a screen reader cope? Are there any guides any where to implement accessible Web 2.0 websites? Help!!!

Posted: 12th January 2008 | By Peter Abrahams :

The W3C has been thinking very hard about making AJAX Web 2.0 applications accessible.
The latest draft proposal Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA Roadmap) can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/aria-roadmap/ .

Posted: 29th January 2008 | By byron musgrove :

First off, this is a great blog, keep up the good work.

I've heard that some js (aka ajax) is searchable only if the content being pulled exists on that page. If it is dynamically pulling content from elsewhere, that content is not searchable.

Another question i have is about accessibility. Do the search engines give higher rankings to sites that utilize accessibility tools? For example, the wcpo.com website has a new feature click-2-listen for each of it's articles.

I would think the engines would give them some type of "credit" for being more accessible?

Thoughts?

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