Webcredible releases website accessibility report

Webcredible has launched its 2010 E-commerce Accessibility Report, which suggests that BandQ and John Lewis are the leading high-street retailers in website accessibility.

Webcredible has launched its 2010 E-commerce Accessibility Report, which suggests that BandQ and John Lewis are the leading high-street retailers in website accessibility.

BandQ replaced John Lewis at the top of the study of 20 leading retailer websites, with a score of 84 per cent - 16 per cent up from 2009.

Despite slipping from first to second place, John Lewis still improved its score by five per cent to 79 per cent.

However, according to the study, Marks and Spencer's website - launched in October 2009 - only increased its accessibility score by one per cent to 59 per cent to remain in 12th place.

This is despite the work done by the retailer to improve its usability score, which led to it topping Webcredible's E-commerce Usability Report in October 2009.

Currys achieved a score of 37 per cent and Woolworths scored 38 per cent, despite now being an online-only retailer.

Webcredible's 2010 E-commerce Accessibility Report gives guidance to online retailers and helps them to understand how they can improve their sites and make them accessible to users with a broad range of disabilities.

The guidelines that need improvement are still consistent with previous years, including not embedding text within images, and providing focus states for links and skip links.

The average accessibility score had improved last year to 61.6 per cent, but this year's report shows that there has been a slight drop in e-commerce accessibility standards since then with an average score of 60.2 per cent in 2010.

This drop can be attributed to the bottom end, with four retailers now scoring under 50 for accessibility, as opposed to just one in last year's report.

In addition, it is clear that sloppiness and inconsistency are still inherent when it comes to the implementation of web accessibility.

However, the top score of 84 per cent is 10 per cent higher than last year and there are now seven retailers scoring over 65 per cent.

Accessibility improvements were most obvious in the case of BandQ, but other big improvements were seen with H Samuel climbing from eighth place to third, improving its score from 65 to 75; and Next, which climbed from 18th to 11th with an improvement of nine per cent to 60.

Trenton Moss, director at Webcredible, said: 'Despite increasing awareness over the past couple of years of the need for accessible websites, it still seems that accessibility is not considered as much as usability in site build and developments.

'It is clear that a lot of work has taken place on existing and redesigned sites to improve usability, but it seems in all this work many retailers have failed to take accessibility seriously enough.

'There are legal requirements for the accessibility of websites set out by the Disability Discrimination Act and the basics of accessibility also complement usability and search engine optimisation, yet it is still not a high enough concern for some website owners,' he added.

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