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Accessibility Audit Summary

The following summary is taken from the accessibility audit of the Legal Aid Board website completed in February 2009 by Open Interface:

"The Legal Aid Board website has been built with accessibility in mind. However, there are a number of errors and instances of non-compliance throughout the site. Listed below are a number of the more serious errors and instances of non-compliance:

For a site to be WAI compliant, its HTML code must also comply to a published formal grammar. Out of the sample of pages we audited 70% of pages failed to comply .

The <img> tag should only be used to display images e.g. photos, graphics, maps, etc. Throughout the site the <img> tag has been incorrectly used to display images in which the composition contains text.

Like many other public sector websites, the site makes extensive use of the proprietary Adobe PDF file format and Microsoft Word format. To comply with the guidelines a HTML (web) version of these documents should also be provided, where appropriate.

The majority of link titles are compliant, however there are instances of poorly created links, title duplication and URLs being used as link names on a number of pages.

In addition to this, links to non-HTML documents e.g. PDFs are not always identified.

There are many instances of pages containing more than one language. However these instances fail to mark up and identify the text with the appropriate lang attribute.

Deprecated tags such as <b>, <i> and <bgcolor> are used to style text. These tags have been superseded by the <strong> tag, <em> tag and CSS.

A number of data tables on the site have not been created in an accessible manner. Table headers must be identified and marked-up with the <th> tag. In addition the scope attribute must be added to identify the type of data table.

Finally, the site does not make use of heading structures. All headings must be structurally marked-up using the HTML headings tag e.g. <h1>, <h2> etc.

Overall accessibility rating of the website is Average.

The summary table shows the amount of checkpoints that the website has failed. However the site might have failed the checkpoint more than once. This is taken into account in the site grading and is detailed in the report itself."

Our ratings explained:

Very Poor Highly inaccessible, and very difficult to improve without a complete redesign.
Excellent: Highly accessible, with a very high proportion of pages complying WCAG guidelines.
Poor: There are current barriers that make the entire site inaccessible but these could be overcome without excessive difficulty.
Average: Does not present too many barriers to access, but there are still some accessibility issues that need to be overcome.
Good: Basically accessible, but certain features could be improved or added to enhance the accessibility of the site.