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Site accessibility: as well as maximising your visitors, making your site accessible to those with disabilities is a legal necessity, says Jonathan Webdale.

Article Excerpt
There are several reasons to make your Web site accessible to people with disabilities. The obvious moral case is that excluding 8.6m people in the UK--one in seven--from the news and services you provide online is blatant discrimination.

Then there's the business case. The Employer's Forum on Disability says such exclusion means companies are missing out on a combined annual spending power of between [pounds sterling]45bn and [pounds sterling]50bn in the UK alone.

And of course there's the legal case. Companies that fail to make efforts to ensure their Web sites are accessible are in breach of the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act.

This last only really became clear in 2002 when the Disability Rights Commission (DRC), the independent body set up by the Government to eliminate discrimination against disabled people, published a code of practice which for the first time makes explicit reference to online services.

The DRC's...

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