With the UK Disability Discrimination Act enforced in October 2004, British businesses need to wake up to the fact that accessibility is an issue that requires their urgent attention.

For a device, application or website to be accessible, it needs to be reasonably possible for anyone, including someone with disabilities, to access the content and its associated functionality. As the level of accessibility increases, the differences in ease of access between different groups of users decrease.

Making websites accessible is particularly important, because the Web is thought to epitomise the availability of information for all. Information is very often not freely available to people with disabilities.

Accessible design requires a proactive approach, with inputs throughout the process of product development. For example, typical inputs to a website design project could include:

Inception: test prototypes on a range of disabled users to gain usage insights and identify key usability issues with assistive technologies.
Coding: validate HTML and any other technologies against WAI standards; conduct an expert accessibility audit with different combinations of browsers and operating systems.
Usability testing: make sure disabled users form a segment of the recruitment sample when usability testing.
Pre-launch: for good measure, do a final code review to check your site against up-to-date standards and guidelines.

Many businesses are put off by the costs associated with accessible design. This type of thinking is short-sighted because it fails to recognise that the cost of improving the accessibility of a product in development is miniscule compared to the cost of making changes to a launched product, or even the costs of lengthy legal proceedings.