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Local government has outperformed a sample of private sector organisations in the finance, retail and travel sectors (including Northern Rock, EasyJet and Tesco) on awareness of accessibility policy and its implementation.

This is the key finding of research by Socitm Insight on website accessibility statements which, according to the latest guidance from the Central Office of Information (COI) and the British Standards Institute (BSi) play a central role ensuring that an organisation’s website is actually accessible to all users.

The research is published in A world denied: a supplement for Better connected 2009 on accessibility statements. This looks at one of the key elements of accessibility practice, and follows last year’s more general guidance on making websites accessible.  If accessibility good practice is not followed, and websites are not designed to accommodate their needs, disabled people and others can find difficult or even impossible to use.

The findings published in the supplement come from a short survey of 12 questions testing organisations’ conformance with the BSi PAS 78 guidance about accessibility statements. This was supported by two mystery shopping e-mail tests, the first of which requested help for a blind person, and the second which asked about the organisation’s plans for improving web accessibility.

The supplement lists councils exhibiting good practice and highlights examples. It also provides tables showing the test results of all councils and private sector organisations covered (among private sector organisations tested are Lloyds TSB, Northern Rock, Tesco, Boots, IKEA, WH Smith, EasyJet, Lastminute.com and the AA.)

The research found that:

    * Having a good accessibility statement is linked to better accessibility performance overall: organisations that passed the accessibility standard in Better connected 2009 performed 23% better than the rest on this new piece of research
    * A much higher percentage of local authority websites (79%) have a link on their home page to an accessibility statement than private sector websites (44%). Links via the navigation were stronger in council websites
    * Council accessibility statements met specific PAS 78 criteria marginally better than private sector ones and 47% of council accessibility statements were excellent or satisfactory compared with 16% in the private sector
    * 53% of councils gave a satisfactory reply to our e-mail about help for a blind person with using the website, compared with 23% in the private sector
    * 50% of councils gave a very good or satisfactory reply to our e-mail enquiring about plans for improving accessibility (we did not test the private sector on this).

According to Martin Greenwood, Programme Director for Socitm Insight and author of the supplement, all organisations should create an accessibility statement based on the criteria in the COI and BSi documents, or if they already have a statement, review it against these criteria: ‘The accessibility statement plays a key part in any campaign for raising awareness internally, and possibly externally, of the importance that the council attaches to this issue. It goes without saying that none of this is any use if the intentions in the accessibility statement are not properly implemented, but nor should we overlook the fact that the statement itself is the first step in the right direction’

A world denied: a supplement for Better connected 2009 on accessibility statements is available free of charge to Socitm Insight subscribers and can be downloaded now from the Socitm website.