TIP 14

Is your web site legal?

Is your website design legal under current UK Law?

The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 - The DDA and the secondary legislation applied within Northern Ireland have placed a legal duty on service providers to make reasonable adjustments to the way they provide services to ensure that disabled people can use them.

The DDA states that disabled people should not be treated less favourably than other people when accessing services. This duty extends to the provision of websites where a website falls within the definition of a service under the terms of the DDA.

It is not possible to provide a definitive specification for a fully accessible website which will satisfy the requirements of the DDA, however the guidance set out in PAS 78 represents what the Disability Rights
Commission (DRC) believes to be good practice website design.

The Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (2001) (SENDA) amended Part 4 of the DDA to specifically include education, so educational establishments are legally bound to ensure their course-related website content is fully accessible.

You must make reasonable adjustments to your website to legally comply with UK Government regulations, as described in the UK DDA & SENDA. This means you must ensure that there are no obvious barriers to disabled users on your website.

So, validate your HTML and CSS, and test your website against WCAG (BOBBY or Watchfire). If your site has Priority 1 WCAG errors in the code, you are effectively leaving your organisation open to prosecution under the UK Government DDA & SENDA, although the chances of this happening in the UK is very slim indeed.

The advice is obvious - comply with W3C Recommendations and make efforts your website design accessible.

NEXT > .< BACK