The Disability Discrimination act (DDA 1995) and the extension to the act relating to education (the Special Educational Needs & Disability Act (SENDA) require that reasonable steps are taken to ensure that persons who are disabled are not excluded from utilising goods or services on the grounds of this disability. This obligation is applicable to both free and pay for products and although yet to be tested in UK courts is perceived to apply to web and electronic based services.

We operates within the social model of disability believing that people are disabled by the environment around them rather than by individual characteristics and builds usability and flexibility in to all its services. A range of accessibility services is available:

Audit services

The first step toward making sure your existing website or E-based service is compliant with UK and/or international accessibility legislation is to have an access audit carried out. Such an audit will flag up potential accessibility issues and should be the basis of any future amendments carried-out. ODL has a wealth of experience in accessibility and usability testing and has a number of tools available for this work.

Retro-fitting

If your electronic resources contain elements which might represent access barriers to disabled people, for example if some features do not work with assistive software commonly utilised by disabled people to optimise their use of a computer then ODL may be able to help. Retro fitting a website or other electronic media for accessibility can include a variety of aspects including changes to some design elements such as layout, colour scheme, text attributes, amendments to the navigation structure to aide comprehension, alternate presentation of rich media content such as text descriptions of images for people with poor sight or text captioning of audio content for those with hearing loss, and much much more.

Specialised services

All of our products are designed with basic accessibility and usability in mind and are rigorously tested prior to completion however we can also offer a range of specialised enhancements for inclusion in any website or multimedia product whether existing or commissioned from us. Examples of such enhancements include captioning of Flash animations audio narratives and video footage, synchronisation of rich media content, transcriptions of audio content, text descriptives of images, user definable preferences and much more. For more information and free training courses see www.help2access.org.uk