Does your website comply with UK Law?

Running your own business places many demands on your time. Sometimes it is easy to overlook simple things... like making sure your website complies with UK Law. Maybe your website is a few years old and you are unaware that the laws have changed in that time, or maybe you had a go yourself and managed to put together a website which saved you some money at the time.

However, you need to be aware that...

  1. From 1 January 2007 all companies in the UK must clearly state the company registration number, place of registration, registered office address on their website. If the company is being wound up, that fact also needs to be on their website.
    A common place to put this information is in the "About us" or "Legal info" page of the site - it does not have to appear on every page.
  2. The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) makes it illegal for a website provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide a service that is generally available, providing a service of a lower standard, or failing to comply with a duty to make reasonable adjustments.
    There are many guidelines recently established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to help make sure websites are accessible to all.

What is Web Accessibility?

Web Accessibility means making the web useable by everyone whatever their ability or disability.

The internet has the power to reach a worldwide audience.  Your target audience is probably much smaller than that, but there will still be potential customers with, for example, poor eyesight, dyslexia or colour blindness.  People who use screen readers to understand web pages or view text only pages. Your website should be flexible enough to be adapted to the needs of the user.

Try testing your website against one of these online checkers

Don't be alarmed! Some of the errors may be easily remedied.

For example, all images should have meaningful text descriptions attached which screen readers can access or perhaps the structure of the web page should be clearer, e.g. using headings and subheadings appropriately.

My advice is to think about making the most popular pages of your website accessible as soon as possible and then setting a timeframe and a budget to tackle all other pages.  Contact me now if you would like my help.

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