By Chris Winter. 25 March 2025
An Accessibility Statement informs users about the accessibility of a website. The absence of an Accessibility Statement is a warning that the website may have poor accessibility. Furthermore, the websites owner may care little about the needs of disabled people.
I have subjectively observed that the home pages of those websites without Accessibility Statements typically have a greater number of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) conformance errors. I decided to quantify my anecdotal observation.
During the recent past I have evaluated a 200 home pages using the WebAIM WAVE tool. In addition, I have manually recorded the existence of an Accessibility Statement for those websites evaluated. In all honesty the disparity in the average number of WCAG conformance errors surprised me:
- Home pages with an Accessibility Statement average 13.4 errors
- Home pages without an Accessibility Statement average 180.8 errors
From this I have concluded that the absence of an Accessibility Statement is not an absolute but it is a strong indication that a website is not very accessible and users may choose not to proceed.
Through the execution of my work in this area, I have discovered some misuse of Accessibility Statements, examples follow:
- Accessibility statements have described the accessibility to physical sites.
- Accessibility statements have been used to promote the accessibility professional services provided by companies.
I have not named and shamed organisations for their misuse of Accessibility Statements.
There is a great deal of readily available information on Accessibility Statements on the web. Here are some examples:
- The following provides a good description of what an Accessibility Statement should be: accessiBe Acessibility Statement.
- It is clear to me that within the UK that public sector websites are generally UK government websites are regulated to both comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and to publish Accessibility Statements in its Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2028.
The UK government publishes samples of which are available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sample-accessibility-statement - However, according to a recent government review published in December 2024 not all Accessibility Statements are being properly maintained. Government accessibility monitoring.
[Note from Archives of IT. We do not have an accessibility statement on our website at the moment but we are planning to make our website more accessible in the future and will include such a statement. We appreciate Chris’s continued diligence in matters of digital accessibility.]
My Previous blogs for AIT:
- Raising awareness with organisations about digital poverty and accessibility. https://archivesit.org.uk/blog-2/raising-awareness-with-organisation-about-digital-poverty-and-accessibility/
- Making the World Wide Web more Accessible
https://archivesit.org.uk/blog-2/making-the-world-wide-web-more-accessible/ - Low colour contrast makes websites illegible
https://archivesit.org.uk/blog-2/low-colour-contrast-makes-websites-illegible/ - The IT Industry has standards and guidelines dating back a quarter of a century. https://archivesit.org.uk/blog/the-it-industry-must-do-more-for-disabled-people-part-two/
- (ESG) the potential silver bullet that I have been searching for to make a step change to the accessibility of digital services. https://archivesit.org.uk/blog/the-it-industry-must-do-more-for-disabled-people-part-six/
- A summary of the story so far, as told in parts 1 – 6. ?https://archivesit.org.uk/blog/the-it-industry-must-do-more-for-disabled-people-part-seven/
- Awareness is a lifetime experience. ?https://archivesit.org.uk/blog-2/the-it-industry-must-do-more-for-disabled-part-8/
- Legislation and regulation are required to improve digital accessibility, but there are significant benefits to be gained from self-regulation. ?https://archivesit.org.uk/blog/the-it-industry-can-do-more-for-disabled-people-part-nine/
- The Valuable 500 white paper on Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) and Disability Data and says that all organisations should include W3C Web Content Accessibility Content within their Environment Social and Governance (ESG) programmes.
https://archivesit.org.uk/blog/ - Given there is digital accessibility legislation and regulation I ask why it isn’t always implemented.
https://archivesit.org.uk/blog-2/the-it-industry-can-do-more-for-the-disabled-part-11/ - https://archivesit.org.uk/blog/the-it-industry-must-do-more-for-disabled-people/
About the author
Chris Winter FIET FBCS CITP is an Advocate for the Digital Poverty Alliance, an evangelist for digital accessibility and a former IBM Fellow, now retired.
About the Digital Poverty Alliance (DPA)
The DPA defines Digital Poverty with five key determinants: the affordability of devices and connectivity, accessibility (for the disabled), skills, motivation and a lack of ongoing support. With the breadth of digital poverty being so broad. Its objective is to eradicate digital poverty in the UK by 2030.