B.B.C. News

The British Standards Institution has evolved guidelines for websites that would enable disabled people to navigate them easily.

Disability Rights Commission (D.R.C.), U.K., has called upon persons with disability who use the Internet to rise up against inaccessible website owners and help it take complaints with the force of law. The step from D.R.C. followed the launch of new guidelines to amend the limitations in Website Accessibility Initiative, set up by the World Wide Website Consortium. While publicising the new guidelines, D.R.C. called up on disabled people to complain about offenders so it can take action against them.

New guidelines on how to make websites user-friendly for disabled people have been developed by the British Standards Institution. The initiative was sponsored by the D.R.C. after an investigation in April 2004. The report revealed that more than 80 per cent of websites were inaccessible to people with disabilities.

The commission estimates that when disabled people come across inaccessible sites they usually just move on to the site they can use. Without disabled people prepared to challenge the establishment in the courts, the D.R.C. can do little more than provide advice and guidelines.

The guidelines named P.A.S. or Publicly Available Specification -- 78 (P.A.S. 78), describes itself as a guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites.

The D.R.C. asserted that it is vital for disabled people to be a part of web accessibility testing. By making websites more accessible, site owners would be in a position to tap into the estimated Pounds 80 billion (Rupees 6,320 billion) spent by people with disabilities, every year.