Disability compliance and the DDA

Five excellent reasons to make your site disability compliant:

• In the UK and USA it's a legal requirement to take reasonable steps to allow all users to understand your site.
• A disability compliant website will run faster.
• It will also work better from an SEO perspective.
• Preventing a significant section of internet users from being able to use your site can mean your company misses out on sales.

So, making sure that your website is accessible to disabled users isn't just an ethical concern –
it's a legal and business sales issue too.

PROPERO's web design team work to a strict set of standards, as set out by the W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium). If we're designing your website from scratch, we'll ensure that CSS and XTML, as well as any other programming languages, are used correctly.

You may also want us to assess your current website accessibility. We're happy to work with your present design and coding to make it DDA compliant – without losing the look and feel of your site.

Get in touch with us to discuss your website needs and to find out how we can make your site disability compliant.

What is a website disability act?

In the UK, The Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 states that all service providers must take reasonable steps to ensure that disabled customers aren't prohibited from using services (DDA compliance). In the USA, the equivalent is the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Legal action has been taken against some websites in the USA that don't comply with disability laws, and many website in the UK have been contacted by organisations such as the Royal National Institute for the Blind requesting DDA compliance.

In terms of your website, that means making sure that people with visual impairments or hearing disabilities can navigate and understand the site using the appropriate software. It also means making some concessions for people with other conditions, such as epilepsy or motor neurone disease (for example putting warnings on your site before any flashing effects are used, and making navigation buttons easy to find). It's worth testing your site with accessibility software - such as a screen reader like NVDA - to see if it is easily understood.