The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA), makes it illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities. The Disability Rights Commission makes clear that this applies to services provided via web sites, and providers have had to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people since October 1999.
Under the DDA, discrimination occurs where:
The content of a web site should be made accessible to disabled users. This can be achieved most simply by complying with internationally agreed guidelines that have been established by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and adopted as authoritative in European and UK legislation.
Compliance with these guidelines means that the content will be available to a wide variety of browsers, and someone with a disability such as low vision or blindness can define their own text size and colour combinations, read the page through a speech synthesiser or output the content to a braille display.
Experience also shows that websites complying with the standards are more accurately indexed by search engines than non-compliant sites.
If you provide accessibility by means of an alternative text only site, it must offer a similar level of service and content as the original site to avoid discrimination.
The office of the E-envoy has laid down guidelines for central and local government web sites. Please see further notes on Accessibility guidleines for local government websites.
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