27 April 2005
A new report on the levels of web accessibility achieved by London Borough Councils has found that 85 per cent are failing to meet government targets.
The Web Accessibility in London Borough Councils report, conducted by web accessibility consultants Nomensa, assessed 33 London local authority websites against accessibility guidelines and discovered only 15 per cent have met the web accessibility recommendations defined by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's (ODPM) Priority Service Outcomes Report.
However, of these nine per cent of websites exceeded the recommendation, and have achieved a triple-A rating as defined by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
This lack of accessibility comes despite part III of the Disability Discrimination Act that came in to force on October 1, 1999 and states that websites, as coming under provision of goods, facilities and services section, should be accessible to all.
Commenting on the report, Leonie Watson, Nomensa's head of accessibility said: "In many cases, accessibility has not been given due recognition, which puts fundamental barriers in the way of many people accessing local authority services online."
Conducting the report Nomensa measured websites against ten best practice criteria for web accessibility, the evaluation process was a combination of manual and automated testing, with nine of the categories carried out through manual evaluation.
In addition to 85 per cent of websites failing to meet the recommendations of the ODPM Service Outcomes Report the study also found that 79 per cent were failing to code their web sites with valid HTML code as recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium's web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG).© DeHavilland Information Services plc
Keep up to date with industry and Nomensa news by signing up to Nomensa newsletters.
