Disability Discrimination Act

November 3rd, 2006 4

The DDA is the UK governments legislation that governs all sorts of businesses and services to ensure that people with disabilities can access the same services as everyone else.

(un)Fortunately for web designers this legislation covers web services too! At Trinity we’ve developed certain working practices that ensure all our client sites are DDA compliant as possible. So what are these requirements, and what can be done to ensure that your next project isn’t going to get your clients sued?

We’ll it’s not actually that difficult, thanks to our friends at the W3C who’ve drawn up a Checklist of Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. In general It’s acceptable to ensure all your pages meet at least the Priority 1 checkpoints (or provide an alternative page that does) and as far as possible follow the Priority 2 checkpoints - especially so if your site is intended for the wider EU user-base.

So, getting back to basics, what do you really need to do to ensure your website is compliant? (remember, these are the bare minimum, always refer back to the W3C guidelines).

• Use (x)HTML and CSS to separate content and design. That way users can turn-off the styling and control the size and colour of the text as they wish
• Use alt tags on images to describe their content and title tags on links and abbr items to give an extended explanation of what these elements are.
• The use of accesskeys to offer an alternative way of navigation on all main navigation, and any sub-navigation possible
• Use Javascript to replace any Flash elements, so you’re providing an html alternative

These four things will not only cover many of the guidelines, but also increase you’re chances of getting listed in the search engines too. It’s worth investing a little more time investigation exactly what the DDA requires of web sites, an good staring place may be to Google “DDA” and read up on some of the official (and not so official) documents you find. Don’t underestimate the good that following the guidelines will do your website, it’s well worth investing the time to find out more.

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