Sites slow to help disabled

W3A’s visualisation tool shows how the Herald’s homepage would look to someone with diabetic retinopathy.

If recent lawsuits in Australia and the United States are any indication, New Zealand businesses may be opening themselves up to litigation by failing to make their websites accessible to disabled persons.

Last year, two major US travel sites, Priceline.com and Ramada.com, paid out US$40,000 ($56,000) and US$37,500 respectively to settle complaints that their websites were inaccessible.

The Sydney Olympic Committee was successfully sued for A$20,000 ($21,500) a few years ago because its site did not meet accepted international guidelines.

Although a precedent has yet to be set here, some proponents of adopting the standards say it is only a matter of time.

"You could argue it either way whether it's legal or illegal," said Bruce Aylward, owner and chief executive of Wellington-based website auditing firm W3A.

But under the New Zealand Human Rights Act, he says, a company's website can be considered a public service, especially if it offers online sales.

"Under that understanding, you could argue that a website would be required not to discriminate against disabled people."

Guidelines set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international group that develops web standards, suggest ways to improve accessibility to visually-impaired people. Text-based alternatives should be provided to multimedia content, language should be kept simple, colour and javascript should not be relied on exclusively, and tables should transform easily.

Sites that do not follow these guidelines can be difficult if not impossible to view by visually impaired users, possibly provoking discrimination claims.

An example is a travel agency that offers discounted fares on its website - if disabled people cannot use the site, they can claim they are being unfairly discriminated against.

According to Statistics New Zealand, there are about 81,500 visually impaired people in the country.

The Government is ahead of the pack in adopting the standards, with all agencies aiming to have their sites in line by January.

Edwin Bruce, web standards manager for the State Services Commission's e-government unit, says the motivation should not be to prevent litigation, but to make a smart business move.

"Not only is there a whole lot of good sound moral reasons for encouraging this activity, but at the end of the day if you're going to invest some money in putting information on a website, you want as many people as possible to use it."

David Harris, counsellor for internet governance group InternetNZ, agrees.

"In practice, the benefits are pretty clear," he says. "You can make a pretty good business case for making your website accessible over and above any retribution from the gods of the legal system."

But Aylward says businesses are dragging their heels.

An independent audit by his firm of a company's site costs between 5 and 25 per cent of its original setup cost. An audit includes revealing compliance shortfalls and suggestions to correct them, then a re-audit once changes have been made.

But most businesses, he says, do not want the extra cost or bother.

"My feeling is until if there's actually a case of a disabled person lodging a complaint against a company to the Human Rights Commission, and that complaint goes to court, most companies will feel that they've got enough on their plates already and won't really want to act on this."

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