Study: Most Websites failing the disabled.

According to a recent study, most of the leading websites around the world are failing to provide the most basic accessibility standards for people with disabilities. This is of particular interest to me because while I was pursue my undergrad in psychology I had an emphasis on disability studies and really came to realize how little attention is paid to making anything accessible.

According to the study ninety seven percent of websites did not provide even minimum levels of accessibility. Alex Metcalfe, head of client services at Nomensa said, "This is a global failure and we are very disappointed with the results." The study focus on websites in five key sectors - travel, retail, banking, government and media. Obviously these are pretty much the most significant uses for the internet.

The British Prime Minster's sites alongside the Spanish government site and the German Chancellor's site were the only three to conform to the most basic standards. So what are these minimum standards? In order to reach the minimum standards - tested against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) - websites needed to provide adequate text descriptions for graphical content so that visually impaired people could 'read' pictures. 93% of the websites failed to meet those guidelines.
A further 73% failed to make the grade because of their reliance on JavaScript for some of the website's functionality. JavaScript does not work with some screen readers used by those with impaired vision.
Experts in the website accesibility say that sharing websites that are good examples can go a long way in encouraging others to do the same.

The World Health Organisation estimates that there are around 600 million disabled people worldwide, which represents about 10% of the world's population. Of these, around 80% are believed to live in developing countries.

In the spirit of sharing here is a website for a great artist who happens to be blind, Raul Midon.
http://raulmidon.com/index2.php