Pushing for accessibility inside a financial company.

I'm working for a UK based financial company. People in here are starting to
wake up about accessibility, mainly because of the amendments to the
Disability Discrimination Act, which requires FTSE100 companies to make
reasonable attempts at making their website's compliant.

There's a lot of usability and design problems with our current website,
Javascript dependant drop-down menus nested to four-levels deep, linking
every page to every other page (with no script independant fallback). Its
the design we were stuck with, because it was designed by an external
company, and it was all paid for (The HTML is very presentational heavy). I
have been fighting from the very beginning about the usability of this
website, but marketeers being marketeers, they see only what they want to
see. :-(

The accessibility "project" in here is stuck largely with the perception
that all that's required is alt text on images and title attributes on
links. Nothing about how our nested table layout design, and 56 layered
javascript only menu hampers even the most basic accessibility requirements.
We're catering for the browser list of: Netscape 4, Internet Explorer 4,5,6
and Netscape 6 on a PC only (previously decided that Mac browsers weren't
worth supporting -- even though its the choice of mainstream media). The
accessibility outside that range of browsers is close to non-existant (Lynx
shows five lines of content, and two screens of "navigation" links).

I don't believe we can add accessibility ontop of what we have, so I am
pushing strongly for a complete from the bottom up rebuild. Building first a
completely accessible HTML structure, and only then adding enhancements like
CSS and Javascript to those browsers that request it. That way the list of
supported browsers will not experience a degradation, and our content and
services is still fully accessible to other browsers and devices.

Netscape 4, however, because of the bias that it has to be supported, I'm
thinking about delivering a tables based layout for that browser alone. With
a templated approach to building a website, it will only involve a
serverside browser sniff, and selecting a different template. I know the
problems about browser-sniffing, so by delivering a standards compliant
template to all browsers except those that identify themselves as Netscape 4
shouldn't be too much of a danger.

I've drafted up a discussion paper laying out my position. I've got a lot of
very useful material out of the glasshaus book "Accessible Web Sites", so a
lot of the factual and legal arguments come out of this excellent work.

My current paper is sitting on:
http://www.isolani.co.uk/articles/accessibility.html (I've removed the
company name - in case someone gets funny). My argument is essentially that
a standards based approach is a better alternative to creating a fully
accessible website than "adding on accessibility" to an already broken
website.

Any comments, suggestions and advice will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Mike

Received on Wednesday, 21 August 2002 07:33:11 UTC