“One of biggest myths about law,” continues Mr. Moss, “is that new laws will be implemented in October of this year, when final part of Act comes into force.” This final piece of legislation actually refers to service providers having to consider making permanent physical adjustments to their premises and is not related to Internet in any way. (http://www.disability.gov.uk/dda/#part3).

The law about accessible websites came into force on 1st October 1999 (http://www.drc.org.uk/open4all/law/code.asp) and Code of Practice for this section of Act was published on 27th May 2002 (http://www.hmso.gov.uk/si/si2002/20020720.htm). This means that majority of websites are already in breach of law.

So, can you be sued if your website fails to meet required standards? “Probably,” says Mr. Moss. The RNIB claim that they have considered taking up a number of cases against organisations with regard to their websites. When they raised accessibility issues of website, companies have typically made necessary changes, rather than facing prospect of legal action.

The DRC has launched a formal investigation into 1000 websites and expect to publish their findings some time this year. (http://www.drc-gb.org/annualreview/foreword/index.asp#internet). If your website is on this list then you will have to start thinking about making it accessible to all web users in very near future.

So what does your website need to do to comply to standards? It is widely believed that if, or perhaps more appropriately when, a case makes it to court that W3C accessibility guidelines will be used to assess a website’s accessibility and ultimately decide outcome of case. The W3C is Internet governing body and its web accessibility guidelines can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/full-checklist.html. To further complicate matters, W3C offers three different levels of compliance; it will most likely be Priority 2 guidelines, (which must be satisfied according to W3C) that will probably need to be adhered to.

4. You will not have to incur legal fees The RNIB (Royal National Institute for Blind) and DRC (Disability Rights Commission) have been exerting pressure on companies and government to make their websites accessible. Indeed, DRC is currently investigating 1,000 websites for accessibility (http://www.drc-gb.org/annualreview/foreword/index.asp#internet). If your organisation’s website is on this list then you can expect to be hearing from them soon.

5. The download time of your website will be significantly improved Just 17% of web users are connected to Internet via broadband (www.liquidzope.com/abc/2/4currentusage/currentstatebbd/view). You can be sure that if your website takes much longer than ten seconds to download then many of your site visitors will be clicking away and you will lose their custom.

6. The usability of your website will be enhanced There is a certain amount of overlap between web accessibility and web usability. It has been shown that a usability redesign increases sales/conversion rate of a website by 100% (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030107.html).

7. You will gain good publicity Make your website accessible to everyone and you can tell world about it.