Major European Banks Violate Web Accessibility Standards

July 15, 2015 - PRLog -- A recent study of 25 major European bank websites (http://siteimprove.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/INFOGRAPHIC-25-European-Banks_FINAL1.pdf) show that despite increasing public scrutiny and growing demands for accessible online services, these banks continue to flout the universal WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/). As such refusing to cater to the estimated 20 percent of the population that has some form of a disability that makes navigating the internet difficult.

The study, conducted by website management firm Siteimprove (http://siteimprove.co.uk/), analyzed over 26,000 consumer-banking web pages across 25 English language websites and sub-sites. Each website on average had no less than 39 accessibility issues, whilst the worst performing bank had 51 accessibility issues as defined by the international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0).

Of the accessibility issues found on the websites, ranged from severe to mild, double AA issues, as defined by the WCAG 2.0, dominated, with common accessibility issues such as poor color contrast, cluttered navigation schemes and poor link text prevalent throughout. A number of images on these websites also contained no alternative text, meaning blind visitors who rely on these to get a spoken description of the image are unable to do so – rendering them useless.

A number of vital images that also act as links, had no text alternative associated with them making it near impossible for those with vision impairments to navigate their way around the websites. For many disabled users this is akin to asking a sighted person to find their way around a city relying only on blank signposts.

The study also assessed the quality of the websites in terms of misspellings, broken links, and search engine optimization. To see the full results and see which bank performed best against each criteria visit http://siteimprove.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/INFOGRAPHIC-25-European-Banks_FINAL1.pdf