PAS 78: guidelines available free

Thanks go to our old buddy Cole for spotting this one for us. The Publically Available Specification (PAS) 78 guidelines are designed to educate those responsible for commissioning or maintaining websites where accessibility is a focus, and it’s now available for free download from the Disability Rights Commission website.

The PAS 78 guidelines don’t cover specific methods, features or techniques used to make a website more accessible, but rather a check list for good practice that anybody involved in commissioning a website can use when first planning a web project or contracting a web development agency.

Initiatives like this shift the responsibility away from solely the web developers themselves, and rightly so. Website accessibility isn’t just the responsibility of web agencies and site developers but also the people commissioning and running sites. The sooner both parties accept their duties in the development process the better the web will be.

These guidelines couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time, with the recent high profile redesign of the Government DTI website, which spectacularly fails to comply with the current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Whose fault is this? The web agency who delivered sub-par work or the DTI themselves who either didn’t initially specify a level of WCAG conformance or didn’t bother to enforce this as the development took place. Both parties probably share a proportion of the blame here, but it highlights how crucial it is for the people in charge of tendering, contracting and managing websites to be well educated with regards to accessibility best practices. As such the PAS 78 Guide represents an invaluable asset.