World Cup sites sideline disabled fans

Disabled football fans will struggle to enjoy the same level of access to the websites of the game's governing body because of poor website design.

Abilitynet, an organisation that advises disabled people on technology, said accessibility on the FA and Fifa sites was so poor that both risked prosecution under the Disability Discrimination Act.

Abilitynet used a combination of automated tools and usage by disabled consumers to test usability and accessibility and found that neither reached the minimum level required to ensire that most disabled people could access and enjoy the site.

The FA site failed to label alt-tags correctly. The tags are used by screen-reading applications to describe web links to those with impaired vision to aid site navigation. Alt-tags are displayed visually when you hover a mouse over a link in a web browser, and are widely recognised as being helpful to all website visitors.

The FA's alt-tags contain only the URLs (a technical name for website addresses) themselves, which provide no usual information about the content of a link.

The report’s author Robin Christopherson, AbilityNet’s Head of Accessibility Services and himself blind, said: “As well as a moral obligation to make websites more inclusive there is also a legal one.

"The first successful case was against the official Sydney Olympics website back in 2000 when a blind supporter was unable to access information on the different sporting events online.

"Here we have two websites in an almost identical situation, and we don’t seem to have made any real progress in the intervening six years. It’s been law in the UK since 1999 to ensure that your website is designed to accessibility standards and it’s only a matter of time before we see successful cases being fought here in the UK.”

The FA was unavailable for comment.

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