News Archive

October 2004

18 October 2004 – Own Goal for Premiership Website Accessibility

Last week, computing and disability charity, AbilityNet, published its latest findings in its series of “State of the eNation” reports. This fifth “State of the eNation” report focuses on the accessibility and usability of the UK's twenty Premiership football club websites.

Manchester United's access website, a winner in last year's Visionary Design Awards, came out tops in the report gaining “two out of five stars”, but still fell short of satisfying the base level of accessibility for these investigations. Even though Manchester United's access website came out tops this time around, this kind of separate website is far from the ideal, segregating a proportion of its visitors. All of the other football club sites examined were deemed “very inaccessible”, which included Manchester United's main website.

Unfortunately, the other reports in this series have shown similar trends with respect to the websites of airlines, newspapers, banks and supermarkets, with only two websites in total meeting the base level of accessibility.

The next report in the eNation series will review ten popular websites likely to be used by people for their Christmas shopping.

Read more about the eNation report on Premiership football club websites.