Julie Howell, director of accessibility at digital design agency Fortune Cookie and chair of a British Standards Institution technical committee on web accessibility, gave a talk at the CiB Conference earlier this year. In her speech she explained how disabled people face being excluded from the online world.

She said that the great thing about social networking is that everyone should be able to use it.

Julie said: “But there are problems.  We think that everyone can use social networks, but in fact that isn’t quite the case. The trouble is that to use social networks you have to use third party services and this is where there are accessibility issues.

“Many disabled people are really locked out of the whole social networking phenomenon.  AbilityNet, a national charity helping disabled adults and children use computers and the internet, recently did some research into how accessible social networking tools are and it makes depressing reading.

“They looked at MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo and Bebo and found them wanting.

“If you look at Facebook, all it is is images, text and applications. These are not inaccessible, but the sign up process involves reading text off an image, which stops robots automatically signing up.

“There is a similar problem with online banking applications as well. Once you are through the door it isn’t a big problem, but if you can’t get through the door at the outset it is a not starter.”

The Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 covers how companies should include disabled people in the workplace.

Julie said: ”If you create any social network in the workplace that isn’t accessible you make it harder for people to be included.

“When creating new system you can make accessibility part of your procurement procedures. That is, make sure that you specify what you want from the outset.

“There have been web accessibility guidelines for many years, but the British Standards Institution wrote some new guidelines on how to procure accessible websites. This is called Publicly available specification number 78 (PAS78: 2006)  - Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites.

“It isn’t for techies, and is very user friendly. It signposts all the technical specifications you need, but defines a process to make sure that you get what you want.

“We are now turning this into a full British Standard and this will have some measurable criteria. What we want is disabled people having a better experience online.

“15% of any population is disabled so this is important, and it is equally important to get disabled people involved in any work or testing you do to make sure you get it right,” Julie said.

Julie Howell (julie.howell@fortunecookie.co.uk) is director of accessibility at digital design agency Fortune Cookie. Before this she was digital policy manager at RNIB. Julie works with businesses and government agencies to ensure the usability by disabled people of digital information services.