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Re: Local legislation or the Web Content AccessibilityGuidelines (WCAG) ?

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From: Steve Green
Date: May 18, 2013 10:52AM

In the UK the applicable law is the Equality Act, which was preceded by the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). The Equality Act is only concerned with 'actual outcomes' i.e. whether the plaintiff can demonstrate that there is an actual accessibility barrier. WCAG compliance is totally irrelevant.

The absence of a technical standard in the Equality Act makes it difficult to know exactly what you need to do, especially as no case law has been established. Nevertheless, we recommend that our clients do the following:

1. Aim for compliance with WCAG 2.0 level AA.
2. Do as much user testing with disabled participants as they can afford.
3. Produce a roadmap with timescales and costings to get to what they believe will be an acceptable accessibility level.
4. Keep records of all of this so a court can see there is a genuine intention to achieve an acceptable accessibility level.

Furthermore, the plaintiff cannot go directly to court. They must inform you of the problem and give you the opportunity to fix it or provide the information or service by a different means.

So, to answer your questions:

1. Yes, usability is more important than WCAG compliance, although I can't recall any site that did well in user testing that was not at least close to achieving WCAG 2.0 AA. The reverse is not the case though.

2. No, people are the same everywhere. The whole world should adopt UK law.

3. Yes, I have seen plenty of websites that achieved high levels of WCAG compliance but were unusable for some user groups. One example is excessively long pages. We tested a website on which a form was about 20 screens long and contained several hundred form controls. It was marked up perfectly and passed WCAG 2.0 AA, but it was utterly unusable with a screen reader or screen magnifier.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd