The survey, carried out by SiteMorse on behalf of Business2WWW, found that only 0.4% of the pages on www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk fully complied with the W3 Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) basic checklist, the benchmark against which all websites are measured for ease of access.
However, the DH website www.dh.gov.uk was judged the third best out of 67 popular government websites and scored 100% in basic accessibility against the WAI checklist. Overall, the NHS Direct website was ranked 41/67.
Brian Aherne, speaking on behalf of Business2WWW, said that good design and freedom from errors was crucial to ensuring everybody can read webpage content. “An important part of accessibility is to ensure that the HTML on your site is correct. Using HTML that adheres to W3 standards is the best and easiest way to ensure that your site works properly in as wide a variety of situations as possible."
The review checked pages for download speed and smooth execution of code as well as compliance with the WAI checklist. In order to pass the test at the basic level, sites must include text descriptions of images and transcripts of any audio files, provide scalable text, and more besides.
A spokesperson from NHS Direct Online told E-Health Insider that work on the website was ongoing. “We are currently undertaking a website redesign which will be completed by early 2005. As part of this process, we are carrying out work to improve our web accessibility and ensure that the new design meets web accessibility standards."
Other government health sites tested include www.drugs.org.uk, which was ranked 37/67 and had no pages accessible to disabled people. The Disability Rights Commision website, www.drc-gb.org, was 100% accessible but fared somewhat worse in performance, with a sore of 55/67.
A summary of the WAI checklist can be downloaded from www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/full-checklist.html.