Websites of UK’s Top 100 Companies Criticised
The UK’s largest listed companies are not doing enough to make their websites accessible according to a recent report.
According to research conducted in March 2006 by Nomensa, 75% of the FTSE 100 companies it tested did not meet the minimum requirements of the Disability Discriminations Act.
The homepages of each website were measured and evaluated manually against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). None of the websites tested achieved a double or triple A rating.
The main complaint was not letting users increase text size, which can exclude people with sight problems. Other problems included a lack of text descriptions for pictures, text-heavy pages, and too much use of jargon.
The five most common problems found were:
- Poor quality web code
- Poor use of lists
- Not using headings and lists
- Missing alternative text for graphical elements
- Using pop-up windows
Nomensa said its research found problems across all the major industries. It did, however, single out some companies as being ahead of their peers, including Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury, Alliance & Leicester, Royal Sun & Alliance, Yell Group, Rentokil, and GlaxoSmithKline.
The best-performing sites within th survey were Daily Mail & General Trust and Xstrata, both of which missed out on an AA rating by a single checkpoint failure - apparently checkpoint 3.4:
Use relative rather than absolute units in markup language attribute values and style sheet property values.
The single most common failure across all sites tested.