In 2006 the Informatics Research Institute at the University of Salford won an award from the European Social Fund (ESF), to research barriers to the inclusion of disabled people in labour markets caused in part by inaccessible web content design.
Since the present government came to power in 1997, one principal policy commitment was to provide the opportunities for an estimated 1 million unemployed disabled people to gain equal access to employment opportunities (NDDP 1999). More recently, in what could be regarded as an unconnected policy agenda, government commissioned the Gershon report which identified potential significant savings from the public sector through efficiency gains and the increased use of advanced technology in the delivery of public services (Gershon 2006). Partly in response to Gershon, many public sector organisations have embarked on a programme of transferring their services onto the web. This includes employment advertisements, job and person specifications, and an increased use of online application forms. Yet if web materials are not produced in accessible formats, then the result will be that many people with impairments seeking employment will find themselves disabled by inaccessible web design. This research will determine the extent of such eDiscrimination in the North West of England and develop ‘best practice’ strategies to assist the removal of any disabling barriers encountered. The North West of England has been chosen because parallel economic research has identified this geographical area as one which records high levels of unemployment amongst disabled people. Michael Anyadike-Danes’ November 2005 report for ERINI (Economic Research Institute of Northern Ireland), entitled “Some labour market dimensions of disability in regional perspective”, finds that employment rates for disabled people in the North of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, are massively worse than in the South – some “50 percentage points adrift”. When these factors are combined, the drive to increase employment opportunities for disabled people, the potential cost savings from Gershon based on increased use of ICTs, and the disproportionate exclusion from labour markets of disabled people, what becomes clear is that unless ICT systems are designed with universal access at their core, then eDiscrimination will be embedded inside systems and act against both social policy goals and concepts of equality in many areas of digital communications. This potential for embedding a digital divide which can act to disenfranchise and increase social exclusion for many disabled people has been acknowledged both in the UK and more widely in Europe.
The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) commissioned a report into web access for disabled people (DRC 2004), and concluded that, “81% of websites failed to meet the most basic criteria for conformance to web accessibility guidelines.” In November 2005, the UK Presidency of the EU published a report, “accessibility of public sector services in the EU,“ which concluded that only 3% of EU public sector websites passed the minimum Level A criterion. Both the EU and UK official benchmark for an accessible website is Level AA of the W3C’s WCAG – a standard requiring a fundamental shift in web-authoring techniques, compared to the relatively cosmetic improvements required by Level ‘A’. However, although web content guidelines provide the technical details for constructing an accessible web site, which is a considerable step towards digital equality, the Salford research methodology places disabled computer users at the heart of discussions of access and their input has helped provide additional understandings regarding concepts of accessible design.