PAS 78

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PAS 78: Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites is a Publicly Available Specification published on March 8, 2006 by the British Standards Institution in collaboration with the Disability Rights Commission. It provides guidance to organisations in how to go about commissioning an accessible website from a design agency. It describes what is expected from websites to comply with the UK Disability Discrimination Act 1995, making websites accessible to disabled people.

Contents

History

In December 2010, PAS 78 was superseded by the full British Standard that evolved from it: BS 8878:2010 Web accessibility Code of Practice.

BS 8878 continues PAS 78’s emphasis on providing guidance to non-technical website owners for the whole process of commissioning, procuring, and producing accessible websites, updating it to handle [1] :

Audience

The principal audience is businesses within the UK, but it is a relevant document for charity and volunteer organisations, as well as local and central government. It is also a useful document for web design agencies and web developers as a guide to what is expected of them. It is written from a business perspective and describes the web standards and usability testing needed for producing accessible websites.

At the PAS 78 launch, the Disability Rights Commission's Legal Operations Director Nick O'Brien confirmed that PAS 78 would be used in supporting evidence in a court case against businesses that run inaccessible websites. Although the Disability Rights Commission has so far been conciliatory rather than litigious towards businesses running inaccessible websites, that approach could now change with the publication of PAS 78.

Rationale

In April 2004 the Disability Rights Commission found that out of 1,000 UK websites, 81% failed to reach basic levels of web accessibility (Level A compliance to the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). [2] To alleviate the confusion within UK businesses regarding obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, one of the Disability Rights Commission's recommendations was to establish a best practice in how to commission websites that are accessible. PAS 78 is that set of best practice guidelines.

The Disability Discrimination Act was a significant reason commissioners began taking interest in user friendly and accessible websites. Making websites accessible also widens their target audience, and can allow them to reach a new one in the same beat.

The Family Resources survey revealed that there are nearly 10 million disabled individuals in the United Kingdom, all of whom have an investing power around 80 billion pounds per year. [3] Furthermore, it found that there are millions of other individuals affected by sensory, bodily and/or intellectual impairments, including those caused by the ageing process.

Research carried out by the Disability Rights Commission “The Web : Access and inclusion with regards to disabled people” confirmed that individuals without any afflictions are also able to make use of websites which are optimized to accessibility.

Content developed with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines and specifications in mind could be easily used in other mediums such as television, cell phones, portable computers, and on the internet.

Search engines also prefer to rank accessible content material higher when the equivalent is presented in graphical components.

Ensuring website accessibility may lead to better promotion, as interpersonal inclusion leads to opportunities and equality.

Additional business advantages achieved by developing accessible websites available are given on W3C.

Contents

PAS 78 covers the general principles of building an accessible website, and discusses how disabled people use computers and websites. The heart of the document covers Web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and rich media format (such as PDF, Flash, audio and video). The section on testing covers the technical testing, (page validation) user testing, and user testing with disabled people. The last section covers contracting external companies, focusing on choosing a website developer.

The supplementary documentation contains a number of resources, including suggested user profiles for building up test cases, success criteria, suggested questions for web design agencies, available accreditation schemes, how to select a content management system, and a collection of references, such as organisations and books about web accessibility.

Comparison with Section 508

Section 508 is part of the US Rehabilitation Act, which required Federal Agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. It does this by setting out required checkpoints for website accessibility. This is much like the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 1.0.

PAS 78 is an umbrella document, meaning it does not define any new guidelines or standards, and instead acts as a summary document describing the use of existing web standards and technologies. It currently references the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and promotes the use of structured markup, avoiding presentational attributes, and advises the use of CSS layouts. In essence, PAS 78 advocates the use of existing web standards.

Their approach to PDF and Flash is that it should be used when it is the most appropriate format for delivering content, and that when it benefits the end user, not the authors.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973</span>

In 1998, the U.S. Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to require federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. Section 508 was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities and to encourage the development of technologies that will help achieve these goals. The law applies to all federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology. Under Section 508, agencies must give employees with disabilities and members of the public access to information that is comparable to the access available to others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">World Wide Web</span> Linked hypertext system on the Internet

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists. It allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design ; authoring, including standardised code and proprietary software; user experience design ; and search engine optimization. Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all. The term "web design" is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end design of a website including writing markup. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and be up to date with web accessibility guidelines.

A HTML editor is a program used for editing HTML, the markup of a web page. Although the HTML markup in a web page can be controlled with any text editor, specialized HTML editors can offer convenience, added functionality, and organisation. For example, many HTML editors handle not only HTML, but also related technologies such as CSS, XML and JavaScript or ECMAScript. In some cases they also manage communication with remote web servers via FTP and WebDAV, and version control systems such as Subversion or Git. Many word processing, graphic design and page layout programs that are not dedicated to web design, such as Microsoft Word or Quark XPress, also have the ability to function as HTML editors.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is an effort to improve the accessibility of the World Wide Web for people with disabilities. People with disabilities encounter difficulties when using computers generally, but also on the Web. Since they often require non-standard devices and browsers, making websites more accessible also benefits a wide range of user agents and devices, including mobile devices, which have limited resources. According to a US government study, 71% of website visitors with disabilities will leave a website that is not accessible.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disability Discrimination Act 1995</span> United Kingdom legislation

The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which has now been repealed and replaced by the Equality Act 2010, except in Northern Ireland where the Act still applies. Formerly, it made it unlawful to discriminate against people in respect of their disabilities in relation to employment, the provision of goods and services, education and transport.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Accessibility</span> Modes of usability for people with disabilities

Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible development ensures both "direct access" and "indirect access" meaning compatibility with a person's assistive technology.

Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building web sites, and a philosophy of web design and development that includes those methods.

Universal design is the design of buildings, products or environments to make them accessible to people, regardless of age, disability or other factors. It addresses common barriers to participation by creating things that can be used by the maximum number of people possible. Curb cuts or sidewalk ramps, which are essential for people in wheelchairs but also used by all, are a common example of universal design.

Web accessibility, or eAccessibility, is the inclusive practice of ensuring there are no barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to, websites on the World Wide Web by people with physical disabilities, situational disabilities, and socio-economic restrictions on bandwidth and speed. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, more users have equal access to information and functionality.

The alt attribute is the HTML attribute used in HTML and XHTML documents to specify alternative text that is to be displayed in place of an element that cannot be rendered. The alt attribute is used for short descriptions, with longer descriptions using the longdesc attribute. The standards organization for the World Wide Web, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), recommends that every image displayed through HTML have an alt attribute, though the alt attribute does not need to contain text. The lack of proper alt attributes on website images has led to several accessibility-related lawsuits.

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) was a group of professional web developers dedicated to disseminating and encouraging the use of the web standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, along with other groups and standards bodies.

Tableless web design is a web design method that avoids the use of HTML tables for page layout control purposes. Instead of HTML tables, style sheet languages such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to arrange elements and text on a web page.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web Content Accessibility Guidelines</span> Web accessibility guidelines

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are part of a series of web accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main international standards organization for the Internet. They are a set of recommendations for making Web content more accessible, primarily for people with disabilities—but also for all user agents, including highly limited devices, such as mobile phones. WCAG 2.0, were published in December 2008 and became an ISO standard, ISO/IEC 40500:2012 in October 2012. WCAG 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation on 5 October 2023.

Maguire v SOCOG 2000 was a legal case in Australia about making a website accessible to a visually impaired person.

Design for All in the context of information and communications technology (ICT) is the conscious and systematic effort to proactively apply principles, methods and tools to promote universal design in computer-related technologies, including Internet-based technologies, thus avoiding the need for a posteriori adaptations, or specialised design.

British Standard 8878 is a Web Accessibility Code of Practice which was published by the BSI Group. The standard was officially launched on 7 December 2010.

Disability in the United Kingdom covers a wide range of conditions and experiences, deeply impacting the lives of millions of people. Defined by the Equality Act 2010 as a physical or mental impairment with a substantial and long-term adverse effect on a person's ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities, it encompasses various aspects of life, including demographics, legislation, healthcare, employment, and culture. Despite numerous advancements in policy and social attitudes, individuals with disabilities often encounter unique challenges and disparities.

Disability rights are not specifically addressed by legislation in New Zealand. Instead, disability rights are addressed through human rights legislation. Human rights in New Zealand are protected by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 and the Human Rights Act 1993. New Zealand also signed and ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2008.

The Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW) are a set of guidelines developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in collaboration with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification (STQC) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. They are based on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016, W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, International Standards including ISO 23026, and the Information Technology Act of India.

References

  1. ↑ "New standards for website access". 2006-03-08. Retrieved 2023-10-20.
  2. ↑ "New standards for website access". 2006-03-08. Retrieved 2023-10-20.
  3. ↑ "New standards for website access". 2006-03-08. Retrieved 2023-10-20.
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