SAIF: Making Online Services Accessible

Added on Monday 26 Mar 2012

It is no secret that the world is changing and that we are becoming more connected. Mobile phone usage has been increased dramatically, so it can know longer be assumed that peoples main way of accessing the internet is on a computer. For example the use of mobile phone screen readers for blind people has increased by 550% in less than two years, according to the latest WEBAIM survey. People are making more use of the internet and other services on the go. If this is the case then it is more important now more than ever that online services be accessible.

The project

RNIB is currently undertaking an online services project, which is working towards making the top 50 sites accessible to blind and partially sighted people. So what sites make up this top 50?

If you think about the sites that you use on a daily basis, the majority of them fit into the areas of shopping, travel, money, reading and TV, and as a result are really important in undertaking daily tasks. These could be looking for a train time or food shopping or banking, downloading a book or streaming episodes of programmes on catch-up TV.

Although there are no excuses for inaccessible websites, the issue remains and needs to be tackled. This project wants to cut to the chase and encourage some sites to make some changes as quickly as possible. This project uses a step process which starts with an advocacy approach, working with the company to make changes. If a company will not engage with us or won’t make the required changes we can escalate our approach with a number of stages which end with a legal challenge.

Talking to the companies  

 Once we have this data we approach the company in a friendly way making them aware of the most important issues that we have found. We ask to meet with the company and offer to support them in making the changes. They can then go on to have a full paid audit and go on to become accredited.

Conclusion

This project will continue to work to improve the accessibility of popular websites. We hope that this approach will make a real difference to blind and partially sighted people and their experiences with online services.   

Article from NB, March 2012
RNIB