Price Comparison Sites ‘Excluding Disabled and Elderly Users’

Four of the UK’s most popular price comparison websites are inaccessible to disabled and elderly people, new research has found.

The finding means the websites could be in breach of the Equality Act 2010, which states that information should be equally accessible to disabled individuals as it is to non-disabled individuals.

Conducted by ICT access charity AbilityNet, the research presents a poor picture of accessibility for disabled and elderly users by the websites, which allow people to compare prices of goods and services including online shopping and insurance prices.

There are many technical barriers and ways in which a website can be difficult, or impossible, to use by a disabled or elderly computer user, and a range of these problems were found on four out of the five price comparison websites surveyed by AbilityNet.

Fixing these basic issues would be a relatively simple process, and “would benefit millions of potential customers”, Robin Christopherson, Head of Digital Inclusion at AbilityNet, told E-Access Bulletin.

Four out of the five comparison websites examined (comparethemarket.com, gocompare.com mysupermarket.co.uk and confused.com) scored just one star out of five, failing to achieve what AbilityNet estimate to be the minimum legal compliance standard for website accessibility. This estimate was based partly on checkpoints from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) – a widely used accessibility guidance document.

The fifth site surveyed, kelkoo.co.uk, scored two stars out of a possible five, achieving some of the legal requirements set out in the testing.

Unfortunately, price comparison websites are far from unique in their lack of accessibility, Christopherson said: “In our estimation, around 90%-95% of websites out there don’t meet a base level of accessibility and don’t comply with legal and moral requirements. There is also a very significant business case to making websites inclusive.”

The price comparison report is the latest in AbilityNet’s bi-monthly ‘State of the eNation’ reports, each examining the accessibility of websites in a particular sector. It is available as a Word document or PDF.