Access All Areas

Richard Stubbs

The Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) has an excellent web site http://www.cast.org/bobby/ that can be used to check how accessible a web site is for people with disabilities. In addition the site will allow you to check out how accessible a site is with different browsers.

To use this free service you just enter the URL of the site you wish to check and walk through it page by page. As the site checks each page it places a policeman's helmet besides each feature that may cause a problem. Each helmet is linked to a complete description of the problem identified and suggested solutions.

For each page checked a report is produced and an award is given. A "four helmet" page passes with flying colours and if all pages on a site achieve a "four helmet" award the site as a whole can use the "bobby" logo. Alternatively, rather than going through your whole site page by page whilst online you can download a Java application that will test your site. Bobby uses the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML 4.0 web accessibility guidelines for page authoring to determine the accessibility of a page

I thought it would be good to test some Newham sites. I am afraid I have to report that the three sites I tested: - Newham Council, Newham Health Care Trust and Newham Online all score a single helmet and are ranked as inaccessible. Trying to walk through these sites using a text only interface is a chastening experience. Obviously this is a major consideration that will have to be taken into account when the Newham Gateway site is designed but in the meantime maybe we should all see what we can do to improve the accessibility of our sites.