PAS 78: Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites
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Now that BS8878 has superseded PAS78, I’ve removed most of this post and associated contents as they are out-of-date. I’m retaining stuff about the Legal and General case-study as it’s linked from elsewhere. A better resource for it, however, is at the W3C.
The Financial Rewards of Accessible Web Sites
Legal and General aren’t a fluffy charity, but were worried by their exposure to litigation under the DDA. They identified their major problems as
- Content not web-friendly: PDFs
- JavaScript dependency in forms and navigation
- Too much industry jargon
- Developer’s knowledge of accessibility inadequate
After a program of re-design using third party testers, they reduced their risk of legal action and found, as side-effects:
- A 30% increase in natural search-engine traffic
- “significant improvement” in Google rankings “for all target keywords”
- 75% reduction in time for page to load
- Browser-compatibility (not a single complaint since)
- Accessible to mobile devices
- Time to manage content “reduced from average of five days to 0.5 days per job”
- Savings of £200K annually on site maintenance
- 95% increase in visitors getting a life insurance quote
- 90% increase in Life insurance sales online
- 100% return on investment in less than 12 months.
March 2007: Further presentation from Legal and General on these results.
April 2007: Presentation by Isolani, lead developer at Legal and General.
3 Responses to “ PAS 78: Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites ”
[…] The Web Bruce Lawson from Opera had the keynote about open standards on the web. He gave this interesting link about accessibility. He also mentioned the media queries for CSS to layout your content from […]
[…] significant return on investment (ROI) as a happy side-effect. For Legal and General (quoted from Bruce Lawson’s report) the side-effects included:A 30% increase in natural search-engine traffic“significant […]
I wonder how typical Legal and General’s experience is? The fact that they have been able to measure so many before and after stats suggests that they were already very self aware.