When older people’s charity Royal Star & Garter House redesigned its website last year it had the UK’s silver surfers in mind. The charity’s residents and their families were a tricky audience, with limited understanding of the internet and little experience of finding their way around a site.

“A lot of people are very resistant, initially,” says Patsy Willis, director of fundraising and public relations at the home. “We tried to make it very user-friendly so that somebody who’s not terribly familiar with the web can find it easier to navigate.”

The new site was designed in-house, with all departments feeding into the process, and built by an external professional. No consultants were paid, but despite its straightforward approach to the task, the charity’s site was named most improved on accessibility in the 2007 iConcertina web benchmarking report.

This was no mean feat. The common belief that charities are leading from the front on issues such as sustainability and accessibility is misguided. The iConcertina report, which assessed the fitness of 100 sites from organisations across the third sector, found that performance on accessibility was woeful. No single site surveyed met the report’s six criteria on accessibility, and it described the performance of the top 10 organisations as “mediocre” and the bottom 10 scores “pathetic”. “Accessibility continues to be the Achilles’ heel of charity websites,” the survey concluded.

The results backed up the findings of a similar survey State of the eNation – Charity Websites, carried out in April 2006 by AbilityNet and the ICT Hub, in which none of the sites reviewed hit the highest standards. As Royal Star & Garter House only achieved a good accessibility rating by considering their clients rather than codes of best practice, the sector is clearly failing to meet expectations in web standards.

But ICT Hub web co-ordinator Michael Laffan says charities should not be unfairly victimised. The DRC estimates that 81 per cent of all UK websites fail on accessibility, and charities do not always have the resources that are available to the public and private sectors.

Nevertheless the problem persists, and must be addressed if charities are to remain competitive, let alone act as trendsetters. “Inaccessible websites don’t just deter disabled visitors; they make it harder for others to access information on the website, such as older people, or people with limited computer literacy,” Laffan says. “Voluntary and community organisations really need to take a lead when it comes to increasing web accessibility. So many organisations fail on accessibility issues that are easy to fix, such as not providing text alternatives for images, or by not having meaningful link text. These are things that can be fixed overnight.”

In fact, Laffan believes charities and community groups actually have a moral obligation to make sure their sites are accessible.

Oxfam’s head of interactive media, Hugh Wallace, agrees. The charity re-launched its primary website in early August, after last year’s AbilityNet report criticised it for containing “significant obstacles to accessibility” including text and background colour combinations which do not sufficiently contrast for visually impaired visitors. The charity decided to take action.

“We have been aware for a long time that there has been an issue,” Wallace says. “From a basic good design perspective, but also because of the sort of organisation that we are, it’s not been good enough.”

The new site has been under construction for 18 months, and was largely guided by the criticisms made in the 2006 report. But Oxfam is not complacent. “I don’t think we’re whiter than white. There is still more work to be done,” Wallace adds. “Charities on the whole may well be getting their own stuff sorted out but some of the third parties they use [such as Facebook or Second Life] aren’t.”

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The use of multimedia, integrating video and animation features or social networking capabilities in order to attract new supporters, presents its own challenges. Such additions are essential to remain competitive, but are unlikely to perform well on accessibility.

However, not all agree that the third sector should be leading the field on improving web accessibility. For Andrew Westley, web team manager at the RSPB, pure commerce should be providing the driver in the private sector.

“Website accessibility is something that everybody [from all sectors] should be embracing. Organisations across the board should be making their information, products and services available to as many people as possible,” he says.

In turn, the RSPB has already ensured that its website can be viewed in all modern browsers, regardless of platform or device. Users can resize text, and the site is based around tab navigation which is one of the simplest formats to follow. “We always try to stay up to speed with current thinking on accessibility issues,” Westley claims.

Individual organisations’ efforts to improve their performance, however, do not account for the sector’s overall underachievement. So what is holding charities back? Tight budgeting appears to be having an impact.

“Ensuring a website is fully accessible requires significant adjustments, and in many cases a full rebuild, so unless that work is in the budget, then in many cases it has to wait until a budget becomes available,” says Dan Martin, sales and marketing director at web consultancy Chameleon Net. “No-one disagrees with accessibility principles, but balancing that funding with the zillion other things a charity could spend the money on is tough.”

Martin says charities must make accessibility a budget priority if changes are to be made. IT staff must also educate all web content managers to prevent standards slipping when alterations are made, or extra pages are added. Sites that start out meeting the highest accessibility targets can subsequently fail under the control of authors that don’t understand the issues.

At first glance, the two reports appear to highlight a major discrepancy between the ideals and the performance of the third sector online. But others believe the fuss over accessibility is merely a storm in a teacup in order to generate publicity for reports and their authors.

Margaret Manning, chief executive of digital communications consultancy Reading Room, says charities are already outperforming their contemporaries in the private and public sectors, and should concentrate on creating the most useable and genuinely effective website rather than obsessing about accessibility.

“Charities don’t have to meet the very highest levels of accessibility and neither should they,” Manning insists. “Accessibility is just one part of a website. It’s just one part of the user experience. If you go to a website we want it to be useable for you.”

Useable and accessible, although related, are not actually the same thing. A completely accessible website could be useless depending on its object. A charity looking to raise a significant income through a fundraising appeal, or to raise awareness of its work, may need to produce a very creative Flash website to market itself. Well created, this site should meet standard one (the basic standard all websites should ensure they reach), but it would always fail on accessibility standard three.

“You need to understand your audience group, understand your requirements, and do something which is relevant for them. It’s not quite so cut and dried,” Manning says. In fact, whether or not a website meets a certain good practice standard is open to interpretation, rather like the application of case law. Under some analyses, even the Disability Rights Commission homepage would fail to hit standard three, for failing to write content suited for learning disabled users.

So how should charities approach the task of meeting accessibility standards and sustaining them into the future? The advice from Royal Star & Garter House is simple; fall back on your own knowledge of your supporters and service users, and tailor it to them. As Willis says: “You’re the people who know what you want to get across.”

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