How could you advise a visually disabled friend to complain about a website they couldn't access?

How could you advise a visually disabled friend to complain about
a website they couldn't access?

I would advise a visually disabled person to complain about a website which he/she couldn’t access a website by taking legal actions for breach of his/her human rights on the website owners. The reason for this is that under Disability Discrimination Act 1995, web sites should be designed to some certain standards to be accessible to all people with different disability reasons.

The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 aims to end the discrimination which many disabled people face, and gives them rights in, facilities and services to be accessible without discriminating them.

The three points below are some solutions for the case:

1. Commercial and public websites has to be designed in a way that which could be accessed by disabled people. One of it could be putting accessibility button in order users could change the size of fonts putting alt tags for images and keyboard options for navigations.

2. Colours of texts and graphics should be understandable by the viewer.

3. There should be a screen reader on the website so that visually disabled person can have an option of hearing what the contents are.

Legal cases which have made this precedence in law:

The UK Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 states:
"It is unlawful for a provider of services to discriminate against a disabled person [...] in refusing to provide, or deliberately not providing, to the disabled person any service which he provides, or is prepared to provide, to members of the public."

A qualifications body discriminated against a blind person Sam Lafif, 30, IT Project Manager who decided to study for a Project Management Professional (PMP) in September 2004. Although the company was a US based it was the first company without presence in the UK (United Kingdom) to be liable under the UK’s Disability Discrimination Act.
Sam Latif uses software called JAWS to convert text on her computer to speech letting her read documents and browse the web at work. When she decided to get the PMP qualification she then applied to Project Management Institute (PMI) to obtain the qualification. She was sent copies of more than a million guide. However, she did not get an electronic copy that she could read using her JAWS software. In the end she paid a student to read for her and she prepared for the exam. There was a problem during the exam as well. One she wasn’t allowed to use her computer for a reason that the system may corrupt the good function of computers. She then requested the test centre to download her JAWS software on to one of the computers, but her request was declined. She sat the exam at a third party test centre in Edinburgh with assistance or a reader and she described the exam experience to OUT-LAW. Latif went on to pass the exam, however, she had lodged a legal case proceedings against PMI under Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) of 1995. The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) supported her case.
In the end the case was heard at a Tribunal after a pre-hearing result and pre-hearing Tribunal. On the Tribunal court hearing it was concluded that the respondent has not established that it took all such steps as were reasonable in order to prevent the claimant being put at a substantial disadvantage by their practice of exam questions being read by candidates in a Test Centre, and thereafter recorded their answers.
On 19th October 2006, PMI was ordered to pay compensation of £3,000 for injury to Latif’s feelings.

PMI appealed against the decision, but the appeal was lost on 10th May 2007 and the Tribunal upheld the ruling in favour of Sam Latif.

Reference:


Directgov. Home Page. (2008). The Disability Discrimination Act 1995. [Online]. Available From: http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/index.htm
Accessed on: [28 November 2008].

Duncan R. 2007. Websites May Require Visually Impaired Access In California. Available from: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/13/websites-may-require-visually-impaired-access-in-california/ Accessed on: [01 December 2008].

Trace R., D Center & I Jacobs. 1998-2007. Web content accessibility Guidelines. Last revised: 17 January 2008. [Online]. University of Wisconsin – Madison. Available from: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/#Guidelines
Accessed on: [01 December 2008].