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3.05 Disability Discrimination Act
The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 comes into
full force in October 2004 and has implications for the design of
practice web sites.
Code
The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) have issued a Code of Practice
to go with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. The new code,
while not having direct force of law, provides guidelines that Courts
will refer to in the case of a dispute.
Scope
The DRC code refers to web sites specifically, showing them to be
within the scope of the act. They also make it clear that all web
sites accessible to the public are included, whether they are selling
something or simply providing information.
W3C
The new code itself only offers very broad guidelines to what is
needed to ensure that a web site conforms? There seems to be a general
agreement developing that the guidelines to follow are those from
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Web sites should follow these
in order to make their content available to any user. Conformance
Level "A" - their least taxing set of standards - is becoming
accepted as the minimum.
Specific complaint
The Disability Discrimination Act doesn't provide any central authority
that can bring an action against a web site owner - it requires
a specific complaint by a particular user, disabled within the terms
of the Act, to demonstrate that the web site failed to provide a
service matching that provided for users without that particular
disability. The description of disability included in the code is
fairly wide ranging however so there are plenty of possible opportunities
to offend.
Compliance
Any practice commissioning a web site from now on should expect
to get a site that complies with the spirit of the Act. If a practice
gets a complaint about accessibility then they should have a come
back on the designer.Early compliance with the act brings a reward
- sites that do so are much easier for search engine robots to index
and gain higher rankings in search results - until everyone is compliant
of course.
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