BBC.co.uk - Promoting accessibility online for all users

www.bbc.co.uk is Europe’s most popular content-based website, offering over two million pages of information and entertainment, which means accessibility for its wide cross-section of users is a priority.

The BBC is committed to making its output as accessible as possible to all audiences, both to fulfil its public service mandate and also to meets its legal requirements under the Disability Discrimination Act, and turned to System Concepts to ensure that its website offered a ‘gold standard’ in accessible design.

Although various sets of guidelines were already available to web producers - the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines being the most generally accepted - the BBC wished to gain a clearer understanding of the needs of disabled people in using websites in general, as well as bbc.co.uk, and so commissioned System Concepts to carry out a special report - ‘An Accessibility Study of www.bbc.co.uk: Problems Faced by Users With Disabilities.’

System Concepts is the UK’s leading independent ergonomics consultancy and specialises in accessibility, covering both technology and the physical environment, and so brought considerable expertise to the project.

The research was carried out in several phases.  To begin, a review of publications from disability specific organisations and journal articles on accessibility was undertaken to investigate the current status of web accessibility.

System Concepts then investigated the process of site design within the BBC, concluding that there was no formal process in place, which resulted in varying accessibility standards.

This was followed by a review of websites similar to bbc.co.uk to establish how it compared with its peers.  Using an accessibility checklist based on the WAIs guidelines and describing best practice, the consultancy classified each of 30 sites as low, medium or high compliance - bbc.co.uk’s being medium compliance.  Follow-up interviews were conducted with the high compliance sites which showed that they were not accessible by chance but because accessibility issues were considered throughout the design of the site.

System Concepts complemented these findings by interviewing diversity experts.  The diversity experts comprised disabled people and representatives from organisations working on behalf of disabled people.  This enabled System Concepts to identify the types of problems experienced by the disabled users of bbc.co.uk, which helped to generate a series of recommendations and guidelines to feed into the BBC’s accessibility initiative. 

Finally, System Concepts carried out a usability test of parts of bbc.co.uk with ten participants, with a range of disabilities such as visual, hearing, motor and cognitive impairments using a variety of assistive technologies.  The results confirmed that although bbc.co.uk was generally accessible, the testing did identify a number of access barriers.

Overall, the research project found that for many users with disabilities, accessibility is as much about content as it is about structure.  Use of plain English can go a long way to making sites accessible to deaf people who use British Sign Language as their first language and people with cognitive disabilities.
 
It also concluded that accessibility guidelines, no matter how comprehensive, can never be a substitute for testing with users with disabilities, and System Concepts’ report advised that user testing after any changes should be adopted by the BBC.  Nevertheless, the consultancy did recommend that accessibility guidelines were built into the tools that designers use, in order to help sites reach a minimum standard of accessibility.

Following on from the System Concepts’ research project, bbc.co.uk set up a number of working groups to examine the report’s recommendations and to incorporate them, where feasible, in its production standards and guidelines to improve the accessibility of bbc.co.uk in the future.

Commenting on the System Concepts’ report, Jonathan Kingsbury, head of editorial affairs, BBC New Media said, “The report is a useful resource, not only in making recommendations on how bbc.co.uk and other websites can be made more accessible, but also in giving readers a deeper understanding of the opportunities and challenges that the Internet poses to users with disabilities. It provides the motivation to coders, designers and writers to think wider than their assumed audience by detailing the experiences of real users.
 
“We have made this report available to the public to encourage others to consider the accessibility of their websites and help disseminate good research and best practice throughout the web industry.”

‘An Accessibility Study of www.bbc.co.uk: Problems Faced by Users With Disabilities’ by System Concepts can be found at www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/newmedia/websites.shtml

Last updated: August, 2009

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