I saw a video posted on Twitter from Channel 5 News in the UK (I have no idea what the credibility of them is, it’s an ocean away from me) with anchor Claudia Liza asking Glen Turner and Kristina Barrick questions about website accessibility.

Apparently, they often post videos with captions, but this particular video doesn’t (ironically). So, I’ve transcribed it here as I found them pretty well-spoken.

Some people with disabilities say they are being shut out of online shopping because retailers don't make allowances for them.@scope says half of people avoid it because a website or app was too hard to use.

Glen Turner gives @ClaudiaLizaTV some ways they could improve. pic.twitter.com/MLim0R4pNf

— Channel 5 News (@5_News) December 2, 2019

[Claudia Liza]: … you do have a visual impairment. How does that make it difficult for you to shop online?

[Glen Turner]: Well, I use various special features on my devices to shop online to make it easier. So, I enlarge the text, I’ll invert the colors to make the background dark so that I don’t have glare. I will zoom in on pictures, I will use speech to read things to me because it’s too difficult sometimes. But sometimes websites and apps aren’t designed in a way that is compatible with that. So sometimes the text will be poorly contrasted so you’ll have things like brown on black, or red on black, or yellow on white, something like that. Or the menu system won’t be very easy to navigate, or images won’t have descriptions for the visually impaired because images can have descriptions embedded that a speech reader will read back to them. So all these various factors make it difficult or impossible to shop on certain websites.

[Claudia Liza]: What do you need retailers to do? How do they need to change their technology on their websites and apps to make it easier?

It’s quite easy to do a lot of these things, really. Check the colors on your website. Make sure you’ve got light against dark and there is a very clear distinctive contrast. Make sure there are descriptions for the visually impaired. Make sure there are captions on videos for the hearing impaired. Make sure your menus are easy to navigate and make it easy to get around. All these things are quite easy to do, they just need somebody to sit down and just go through the website and check that it’s all right and consult disabled people as well. Ideally, you’ve got disabled people in your organization you employ, but consult the wider disabled community as well. There is loads of us online there is loads of us spread all over the country. There is 14 million of us you can talk to, so come and talk to us and say, “You know, is our website accessible for you? What can we do to improve it?” Then act on it when we give you our advice.

[Claudia Liza]: It makes sense doesn’t it, Glen? It sounds so simple. But Christina, it is a bit tricky for retailers. Why is that? What do other people with disabilities tell you?

So, we hear about content on websites being confusing in the way it’s written. There’s lots of information online about how to make an accessible website. There’s a global minimum legal standard called WCAG and there’s lot of resources online. Scope has their own which has loads of information on how to make your website accessible.

I think the problem really is generally lack of awareness. It doesn’t get spoken about a lot. I think that disabled consumers – there’s not a lot of places to complain. Sometimes they’ll go on a website and there isn’t even a way to contact that business to tell them that their website isn’t accessible. So what Scope is trying to do is raise the voices of disabled people. We have crowdsourced a lot of people’s feedback on where they experience inaccessible websites. We’re raising that profile and trying to get businesses to change.

[Claudia Liza]: So is it legal when retails aren’t making their websites accessible?

Yeah, so, under the Equality Act 2010, it’s not legal to create an inaccessible website, but what we’ve found is that government isn’t generally enforcing that as a law.

[Claudia Liza]: Glenn, do you feel confident that one day you’ll be able to buy whatever you want online?

I would certainly like to think that would be the case. As I say, you raise enough awareness and get the message out there and alert business to the fact that there is a huge consumer market among the disabled community, and we’ve got a 274 billion pound expenditure a year that we can give to them. Then if they are aware of that, then yeah, hopefully they will open their doors to us and let us spend our money with them.

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