What does web accessibility mean to you? Probably not a lot. But to some it is the key to actually being able to use the internet. For a lot more of us though, it might mean a quicker, simpler and easier web experience. In 2004, the UK's Disability Rights Commission investigated 1,000 websites. It found that 800 of those sites failed to meet minimum accessibility standards set by the web's regulatory body, the World Wide Web Consortium. It also discovered that if a site is accessible by a disabled user it is also a third quicker for an able-bodied person to complete tasks too. Test case Emma Tracey is blind, and she is a journalist from the BBC's Ouch magazine. We set her the task of buying a book from the Amazon online shop, and she found it extremely difficult. Emma says: "I was at my computer for 20 minutes. "To find the book I wanted I had to go through an absolute sea of links, and then when I did find what I needed to buy, and added it to my shopping basket, I couldn't move forward from there because the 'continue' button wasn't marked in such a way that I could find it."
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