British Computer Society charity Ability Net and the Royal National Institute of the Blind, have launched a scheme that accredits websites accessible to people with disabilities.

The See it Right with UseAbility scheme will involve human testers with a variety of disabilities rather than just automated testing. Organisations that act on all the recommendations from the assessment can display an accessibility logo.

Both the organisations are confident that such an initiative will increase awareness on the issue of access and satisfy a growing demand for independent assessment of websites by target users as part of the accessibility audit.

The step has been welcomed by the U.K.’s Disability Rights Commission: (D.R.C.), "We believe the inclusion of disabled people in evaluating accessibility sets an example of good practice. Our own investigation into web accessibility found that nearly half the issues encountered by disabled testers would not have been identified by an automated audit alone,” said chief executive, Bob Niven.

According to the D.R.C., which last year examined 1000 websites run by U.K. organisations about 81 per cent failed to meet the web accessibility standards set up by the World Wide Web Consortium. In addition, their research also showed that sites that were difficult for disabled people to access also turned off non-disabled visitors.AbilityNet said many of the accessibility issues boil down to thinking about users - disabled or not - rather than clever design.