New comparison website opens up access to best online deals for millions of people in UK with disabilities

Compare online save money and raise money for charity – www.PricebyPrice.com

Compare online save money and time – www.PricebyPrice.com is a new price comparison website that provides full access to people with disabilities, as well as guaranteeing donations to charity for every transaction it processes. The new website opens up price comparison services to the estimated 30 million people in the UK have problems accessing existing comparison websites such as Moneysupermarket, Simply Switch and Switch with Which, and so have been excluded from finding the best deals online.

There are 10 million registered disabled people in the UK, who have an estimated annual spending power of £80bn. In addition to this, pensioners in the UK now outnumber under-16s for the first time, and government statistics report that there are 20 million people in the UK who are aged 50 or over; an age where issues with web accessibility such as deteriorating eyesight may become problematic and require websites to cater for their needs.

Although UK legislation requires them to be fully accessible to people with disabilities, most price comparison websites rate poorly in this area. In a report from AbilityNet in August 2008 the best of the sites they surveyed only scored three out of five, while popular sites such as Moneysupermarket.com received only one out of five.

PricebyPrice.com is more accessible than other price comparison websites in a number of ways. For example it is fully compatible with the leading “screen reader” software that are used by people with sight impairments. Compare online save money and save time – www.PricebyPrice.com does not use Flash technology or pop-up windows, which can cause major problems for screen reader software. The site also provides easy-to-use options to increase the size of the on-screen text and to change the text colours, as well as making it easy to use the keyboard to move around the site rather than having to use a mouse. PricebyPrice is also fully speech-enabled by offering free software to all users called Browsealoud, which allows you to listen to the content of PricebyPrice being read aloud to you.

Robin Christopherson, Head of Accessibility services at AbilityNet, the national charity that helps people to use technology said: “I’m delighted that Pricebyprice.com will improve people with disabilities’ access to the best deals and financial information. Despite legislation and clear evidence that widening accessibility pays commercial dividends, UK companies are still dragging their heels in bringing their websites up to the required standard.”

Author and expert on web accessibility Dr David Kreps, Senior Lecturer in Information Systems, University of Salford said: “PricebyPrice.com is extremely good under the bonnet. It is very refreshing to see a site meeting the right web standards. Great efforts have been made in the code to ensure that all the really relevant web content accessibility guidelines are met and I am happy to say the site seems very accessible.”

The new site makes a donation of £2.50 for every commission it receives for a transaction, for example if a consumer clicks through to take up a car insurance policy. This means that users can raise money for good causes as well as getting a great deal for themselves. It is our pleasure to work with Charities Trust who will send the donations to any of the charities chosen by the user, potentially 170,000 registered charities and even more good causes.

Unlike some other comparison websites, PricebyPrice.com is completely independent. It provides completely unbiased recommendations and comparisons without misleadingly consumers with high rankings for “sponsored” deals or other paid-for recommendations.

The PricebyPrice.com site has been developed by Visual Position, a new media agency. Dave Warner, managing director of Visual Position, said: “This new comparison site will open up access to millions of people to the best online deals, which is particularly important as we approach another winter that will see many disabled and elderly people pushed into fuel poverty by rising prices. I’m also delighted that the site will be able to generate a substantial sum for local and national charities.”

The new website was launched at an event in Liverpool at which Professor Phil Redmond CBE spoke. Professor Redmond is chair of ICDC (the International Centre for Digital Content), which supported the development of the new website.

If your company would like to promote this to their employees, as not only a way of saving money, but raising money for your charity of the year or leaving the individual to choose, contact Rodney Jones of PricebyPrice.com on 0151 508 9212 or email rod.j@pricebyprice.com .

If you or your colleagues have a fundraising idea and/or Charities Trust can assist you please forward your ideas to i nfo@charitiestrust.org and we will consider including these in our newsletters to other clients and charities where appropriate.