The Website Compliance Test (WCT) is a fixed scope process, costing just £260, that we use to determine how compliant your website is with the most important web standards and relevant UK legislation. The purpose is to analyse your website and identify problem areas that require attention. Some of the aspects looked at are based on:

• UK Disability Discrimination Act
• UK Data Protection Act
• W3C Markup Validation
• W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• General good HCI (Human Computer Interaction) practice
• User Experience (UX) analysis
• Appropriate use of web technology

The WCT is designed to be a relatively quick analysis, which is all that should generally be required for a small business website or as an entry point to deciding if an in-depth analysis is required for a larger more complex website.

You may be wondering why you should have any interest in a WCT or how the standards and legislation it's based on affects you. Our answer is three fold:

1. If your website is difficult to navigate and quickly reach the information a customer wants or simply looks amateurish, they may not be a customer for long!
2. For certain types of disability, accessing the information on websites can be more difficult and this can be best demonstrated with visually challenged users. From slightly short sighted to black blind, there are methods that can be used to access information on websites and these can range from ensuring nothing more than the text colour is easily legible against the background through having the ability to increase the text size of the page to using a braille keyboard. There are 10 million disabled people in the UK who combined have an annual spending power in excess of £50 billion*. Can you afford not to have a slice of this market?
3. Regardless of the benefits of ensuring everyone can use your website, you have the legal obligation to ensure they can and that any sensitive personal information submitted is both securely received and stored. The Disability Discrimination Act and Data Protection Act lay out clear requirements to ensure this is the case and sadly many not so clear aspects that involve a good deal of cautious interpretation.

Once your website has been analysed a short report is written, outlining the key areas that need to be looked at more closely or altered in order to comply with relevant legislation or good practice standards. This will be delivered to you in order to allow you to read through it in your own time, after which a meeting will be arranged either in person or a telephone conversation, to go through the report and answer any questions you may have.

What happens after this is entirely up to you. Our normal recommendation would be to provide your web developers with a copy of the report and go through it with them, highlighting the alterations you want them to make to your website. If you would prefer not to handle this stage yourself, one of our other services involves acting as project managers and is ideally suited to remove the burden from you. Occasionally if you have a large or complex website, we may recommend that you consider asking us to perform a Website Analysis Report (WAR) which is a considerably more in-depth analysis combined with suggestions for resolving problematic issues.

* Businesses Wake up to Accessibility, 18/11/2004