BBCi accessibility study
as many have now noted, The BBC have published an excellent report on Accessibility
It’s excellent for many reasons, being comprehensive, inclusive, and methodologically sound. Obviously, I also think it’s excellent because Upmystreet gets a High Compliance rating, but I like the fact that it includes dyslexia as a disability that websites should cater for, almost always forgotten.
The report has a very interesting table on page 29, which although they don’t explicitly reach this conclusion, supports a policy Upmystreet has adopted in our projects since launch. The table lists the effect of various Accessibility improvements on various disabilities (visual, motor, dyslexia, hearing, etc), and has a column for ‘no disability at all’ - and every adaptation is either neutral or beneficial to able-bodied users as well
What does this tell us?
- That accessible web design is good web design
- That sites should not have a ‘text-only’ or Accesibility ghetto.
- It’s a total win-win - better design for all, lower cost of maintenance and no worry about version creep or updating
- For me, the text-only version is like a pub that, instead of catering for people of all capability, has a dingy bar in the back specially for people in wheelchairs. It’s lazy and it’s wrong. Web designers should do their jobs properly in the first place.
Also, it’s great that they’ve published it. I’m sure the BBC commission tons of excellent work on licence-payers behalf (apart from Eastenders) that gets read twice and then consigned to the vaults. Let’s see more of it.
Now, I hope that with all the resources they have over at Bush House, they can allocate some htmler to take it out of pdf because it’s a shame that such a fine document gets ridiculed for being in an inappropriate format
Addendum
Duh. I left the punchline out of this piece: I suspect that the