NatWest, owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, had the only site that, in AbilityNet's view, met the basic web site accessibility needs of users with visual impairment, dyslexia or those with a physical disability making mouse use difficult. The rest, it said, are effectively barring millions of disabled people from their sites.
The NatWest site gained a three-star rating on AbilityNet's five-star scale. It was described as meeting "a base level of accessibility," with a clear navigation scheme, links that indicate when they open new browser windows (important for blind visitors) and shortcut keys for main links which help those not using a mouse. It was not without flaws, however: it lacked a site map and uses invisible images to govern page layout which lack the labels that are important to blind visitors.
The sites of Barclays, Lloyds TSB, Smile, Egg, IF and First Direct could only obtain two stars. The remaining sites – HSBC, the Halifax and Cahoot - scored only one star, designating them 'very inaccessible'.
Robin Christopherson, AbilityNet's Web Consultancy Manager, was not too discouraged by the results, however:
"The on-line banks score significantly higher than the sites tested in our previous surveys focusing on airlines and newspapers, none of which reached minimum accessibility standards."
In these earlier studies, the sites of easyJet and The Guardian were each rated poor – but still the best among their competitors, while the sites of Virgin Atlantic and The Sun were among the worst offenders.
"Banks have realised quicker than other service providers perhaps, that the end user is looking for critical functionality – to check their account and make transactions – rather than to be impressed and entertained by ingenious design and creativity," added Christopherson, himself a blind internet user.
Smile, LloydsTSB and Cahoot gave undertakings to improve their sites' accessibility. Smile was the only firm to do this with reference to the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative, undertaking to design future service developments to W3C Priority 1 recommendations, its base level of accessibility.
Typical problems encountered by Christopherson and his team include the widespread use of pictures as links to other pages. The 'tool tips' upon which blind visitors and text browser users rely for spoken descriptions of pictures were often virtually absent. Without these spoken labels, both the images and the links are invisible and the end user excluded as a result.
AbilityNet also found overuse of pictures of text instead of actual text. This not only means that the user cannot modify font size or colour contrast – essential for those with a vision impairment or dyslexia – it also prevents screen reader users from reading the content when so often these images also do not carry tool tips.
Other drawbacks common to several of the sites tested include the reliance on JavaScript – small programs that are built into a page and often not recognised (and therefore rendered unreadable) by many older browsers, or some specialist browsers used by those with vision impairment.
The entire sites of Halifax, HSBC, Smile, Egg, IF and First Direct, including their application processes for new products, depend on JavaScript.
Finally, the text size on most sites has also been 'hard-coded' so that it cannot be easily enlarged – vital for many visitors who have a vision impairment.
With a potential market of 1.6 million registered blind users as well as a further 3.4 million with disabilities preventing them from using the standard keyboard, screen and mouse set-up with ease, e-businesses are losing out on some £50 - £60 billion per year buying power.
Shuna Kennedy, AbilityNet's chief executive, said:
"For thousands of disabled people, especially those with restricted mobility or visual impairment, direct on-line access to their finances and the ability to manage their money autonomously is critical to their peace of mind.
"Internet access to information for disabled people isn't only a commercial and moral duty of care. Like other suppliers of goods and services, web sites have to be accessible as a matter of law under the provisions of the Disability Discrimination Act."
Last year the Royal National Institute for the Blind supported a court action under the Disability Discrimination Act against a firm for its inaccessible web site, the first action of its kind in the UK. The firm settled the action with an undertaking to make its site accessible. As part of the terms of settlement, its name has not been revealed.
Editor's Note: We have begun work on improving the accessibility of OUT-LAW.COM. We recently achieved Priority 2 / Level AA conformance with our sister site, AboutCookies.org