Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and website access

The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) is designed to ensure that blind and disabled users have adequate access to websites. Information about the act is available on the Government's website (http://www.dwp.gov.uk/employers/dda/) . Some of the commissions and institutes that are advocates of the act include the Royal National Institute of the Blind and the disability rights commission. But even they are still developing their information on what users and companies need to provide in order to comply with the act
The act includes sections on the provision of goods and the provision of facilities and there is a code of practice which refers directly to websites. There are a few paragraphs sections that are of importance:
 
Section 2.2: Refers to the fact that it is not lawful to discriminate against disabled people by refusing to provide a service which is provided to general members of the public.
 
Section 4.7: As from 1 October 1999 service providers must take reasonable steps to ensure that areas of their sites which are currently hard to disabled people to make use of are in some way changed to make it easier for such people.
 
Section 2.13: Refers to the services that are affected by the act: for example airline companies with flight reservation booking systems available on their websites would be considered a service and would come under the jurisdiction of the act.
 
Section 5.23: Services must be reasonably accessible for those with visual impairment including our websites.
 
Section 5.26: Services must be reasonably accessible for those with hearing disabilities. Services include websites.
 
Section 3 of the DDA has direct reference to the accessibility is a websites and this part of the act became effective now on 1 October 1999. There will be many websites that are in breach of this act and had been served for many years.
 
I believe that the RNIB has successfully approached some large companies regarding their compliance with the act and have encouraged those companies to comply successfully.
 
So how do you comply ?
 
W3C accessibility guidelines are generally believed to be the standard that will be used to assess a website's accessibility. Their guidelines are available on their website.
 
They are divided into three Priority 1,2,3. Priority one being the most important.
 
It will be worth also noting that in Australian 2000, the Sydney Olympics committee was sued successfully over their websites which were deemed to be inaccessible for visually impaired. This may add weight or precedence for future cases that may be brought in the UK.
 
The priority one guidelines from the W3C website for information are paraphrased below:
 
Priority 1: Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element (e.g., via "alt", "longdesc", or in element content). This includes: images, graphical representations of text ... applets and programmatic objects... graphical buttons, sounds ... stand-alone audio files, audio tracks of video, and video.
 
Comments are welcome...