It is illegal to treat people with disabilities any differently from those without a disability.

This applies to websites.

All service providers, whether in the private or public sector, have a legal responsibility embodied in the Disability Discrimination Act that increasingly requires that disabled individuals have effective access to services and information.

The DDA makes it unlawful for a disabled person to be discriminated against in the areas of:

• employment
• access to goods, facilities and services
• and the management, buying or renting of land or property.

Many people coming to your website may have very different abilities from those you expect, such as:

• They may not be able to see, hear, move, or may not be able to process some types of information easily or at all.
• They may not have or be able to use a keyboard or mouse.
• They may be unable to see colors at all. Many people (about 8% of men and 0.5% of women) are unable to distinguish certain colors, such as red and green.

There are approximately 10.5 million people with disabilities in the UK at present, who have an estimated cumulative disposable income of over £80 billion.

Making a website Accessible to these people makes commercial sense as well as complying with the law.

An Accessible website is also generally

• more search engine friendly
• quicker to load
• easier to update for changing content
• cheaper to maintain
• compatible with different browsers

Our designers can create sites that comply with the standards set down by the W3C consortium with respect to Accessibility and Usability.

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