FTSE 100 companies poor at making Web sites accessible
Howard Lake | 15 March 2004 | News
Some of the UK’s top companies, with large marketing and online publishing budgets, are failing to make their sites accessible to those using assistive devices, according to research from Nomensa.
Nomensa’s survey of FTSE 100 companies’ Web sites found that only 10% of them demonstrated good layout and structure. An appallingly high 79% of these Web sites did not provide alternate text for images, and 77% did not allow font sizes to be rescaled by users.
Only one site had valid HTML, and only one other site had defined access keys for quicker keyboard navigation.
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Nomensa recently surveyed the top 100 UK universities’ Web sites and found a similarly poor situation, with 43% of them failing the same tests set for the FTSE 100 companies.
Often accessibility is not related to a large Web budget: much of it is common sense. So the poor record of top UK companies is not an excuse for UK charities to ignore the issue of Web accessibility.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.