Re: Validity

Hello Robert

> You are asking to give no access to multimedia at level 1? I see a right
> for people with disability. Have we
 >thinked that this could be a discrimination?


You are right, of course this is true. In the Netherlands e. g. a very
strong anti-discrimination law is existing. That means that special
anti-discrimination offices are existing in many cities to make it easy to
complain when it is necessary.

The netherlands doesnot have a special law for accessible websites for that
reason and and also the law "Disclosure of official documents" garantuees
access to nearly all public documents.

But I saw that now  Dutch ministeries have accessible and valid websites as
promoted in the guidelines for accessible public websites
http://webrichtlijnen.overheid.nl/

Also reasons for accessible and va lid websites have been given:
- better communication between websites
- easier to maintain and less costs for it
- using valid code means also that is easy to teach to other web developers
accessibility and  validity because  the specification are well documented
in the w3c-website.

Because the Dutch parliament is urging only to use open source software,
also in the guidelines can be found that every still existing propprietary
software, plug-in, etc must have an alternate open-sourse.

Even is stated that for that reason plug-ins must be avoided as much as
possible, so no dependency to any seller of proprietary software is
existing.

The in the guidelines mentioned wesite  of the ministery of VWS (National
health, Welfare and sport) http://www.minvws.nl/  has valid code  (xhtml 1.0
strict) and is WCAG-A conform. it is failing AAA because links have the same
texts and AAA because of empty fields in forms.


Besides it is now easier to promote valid pages at level 1, because there is
also a log-validator.   In http://www.w3.org/QA/ can be read:

Log Validator 1.0
09 September 2005: Release of the W3C Log Validator version 1.0. The Log
Validator makes it easy to manage the quality of even large Web Sites,step
by step, by finding the most popular documents failing Markup or CSS
validation, or withbroken links. Read the announcement for details. (News
Archive)



I thought that W3C wants to promote its webstandards more often than before.
At least i read that on the mailinglist of the w3c-evangelists (QA-ig-list):
public-evangelist@w3.org  So i can not understand this discussion of a
w3-working group.

This page might be also important: http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/09/Step-by-step
making your website valid, a step by step guide.



Greetings

Ineke van der Maat

Received on Sunday, 6 November 2005 10:46:06 UTC