With 14 million people in the UK living with some form of disability, digital accessibility should be a regular corporate event agenda item.
According to Lawrence Shaw, CEO of the accessibility compliance service, AAAtraq, most sites fall well short of regulations.
Is the events industry catering for those with disabilities?
Regulations state that websites should be accessible and not discriminate against disabled people. Moreover, brands need to recognise the issue and provide solutions for customers.
Two million people live with sight loss—a number that is expected to rise to 2.7 million by 2030, and over 4 million by 2050. One in six of the population—around 12 million people—suffer from hearing loss, with 15.6 million people estimated to have this disability by 2035. We ran three of the top event venue websites through the AAAtraq system and each one was assessed as HIGH risk.
What is digital accessibility?
In simple terms, digital accessibility refers to the practice of developing or redesigning digital assets—such as websites and mobile applications—so they can be more easily used by people with disabilities, including visual, hearing, physical and cognitive disorders.
The process of creating a website or app accessible can be an involved process and includes an understanding of where you are now, a strategic review of digital assets and series of practical implementation steps, such as:
- Structuring headlines to ensure those using site readers can understand the information flow
- Applying descriptive alt tags to images, and suitable descriptions to text links on the page
- Designing forms to cater for accessibility
- Accessibility is also an ongoing process, as websites are often updated, redeveloped or added to
What is the legal position?In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 has brought together a series of separate regulations, including the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. The act confirms that those who feel they have been unlawfully discriminated against by a website that provides a service–an Information Society Service Provider (ISSP)—can bring a claim in the UK courts against a UK-based provider.
This includes where a provider has not made reasonable adjustments to make sure that its website is accessible to disabled people. What does this mean in practice? We know that the US has seen a spike of over 3,001 per cent in accessibility lawsuits filed against companies of all sizes from 2013 to 2019, to around 11,000 cases each year.
How should the events industry approach accessibility?
The first stage for event organisers is to understand where they are now, regardless of what they have been previously advised. AAAtraq’s research demonstrates that 71 per cent of website owners have been told by their website builders that their digital assets comply with digital accessibility regulations, but told: “builders shouldn’t sign off their own work.” Once the risk level has been established, site owners then need to go through a process of accessibility adjustment, involving a series of steps, staff training, supplier management and compliance reporting.
What should event planners be most aware of?
Accessibility is a big issue that the industry needs to wake up to. By law, disabled customers need access to event websites. Not only is this the right thing to do but we’ll begin to see cases of litigation in the UK in the near future as the issue comes more to the fore.
