About Bobby
Bobby is a web accessibility software tool designed to help expose and repair barriers to accessibility and encourage compliance with accessibility guidelines. Bobby tests web pages using the (W3C) World Wide Web Consortium's (WAI) Web Access Initiative. Bobby allows developers to test web pages and generate summary reports highlighting critical accessibility issues before posting content to live servers.
Ask us, or your web designer to test and report on your site for compliance.
Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) campaign
As one might expect, the vast majority of sites on the web cater for the vast majority of people using the web. Few site designers take time to make their sites accessible to anyone who is blind, partially sighted or who finds it hard to move a mouse around.
The numbers of people being ignored are huge, said Julie Howell, net campaigns officer at the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB). In the UK two million people are blind or have impaired vision and a further 6.6 million are disabled, she said, adding that most websites do nothing to help these people get around the web.
Many pay lip service to usability. But few, it seems, are worrying about accessibility. Part of the reason for this is simple ignorance, she said.
"The web is new as a medium and people have wrong conceptions about what blind people can and cannot do," she said. With the right help, blind and disabled people can get around the web just as well as anyone.
There are a lot of programs that can call on the formatting code behind a web page and translate it into a form that can help blind or disabled people navigate it. Sadly, few website designers seem to know how to put pages together to help these programs do their job. This could be because they think making adaptations is much harder than it actually is, said Ms Howell.
Simple changes, such as ensuring every image has a tag labeling what it shows, can help these utility programs enormously. There are even online tools, such as Bobby, that will check a web page for its accessibility and recommend changes to make it even easier to get around. Sadly, the UK government's pages on disability laws narrowly fail the Bobby tests.
US laws mean that the Flash program used to create animations (irritating to many of those who can see them), outputs web page code in a form that can be used by helper programs used by blind and disabled people. But apart from this, any designer putting a website together should spend time thinking about how it fits together and making it easy to get around, said Ms Howell.
"Keeping the design crisp, clear and logical will help everyone," she said. It might download faster too.
Catriona Campbell, founder and head of The Usability Company, said new laws were starting to make employers make both internal and external web sites accessible to everyone. Employer liability laws mean that the work environment must be accessible to everyone.
"They must have wheelchair ramps and also have to have accessible screens," she said.
But the pace of progress being forced by the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act is slow, even though one section of it specifically mentions that web sites should be accessible by all.
Ms Howell at the RNIB believes it will take a court case to remind companies where their responsibilities lie. Until then much of the web may remain a playground for the privileged.