Salt Lake '02 Webmaster: Inaccessible site

>At 12:41 AM 10/30/2001 , David Woolley wrote:
>>  > that the Sydney Olympics had a serious issue with accessibility, and while
>>I suspect, though, that very few of the decision makers in commercial web
>>page design are aware of the Sydney court decisions.
>
>Nor is it at all clear that the decision of an Australian civil 
>rights panel applies to an Olympics web site in the United States.

The principles are identical in the Australian Disability 
Discrimination Act and the U.S. ADA. As I wrote in 
<http://www.contenu.nu/socog.html>:

>>To respond to the objection that this case, having taken place "far 
>>away" in Australia, is unrelated to Web design in other nations, we 
>>would suggest examining the similarities among the Disability 
>>Discrimination Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the 
>>Canadian Human Rights Act, not to mention provincial, state, and 
>>territorial human-rights codes. The legal principles of unequal 
>>treatment ("discrimination"; "unfavourable" treatment) and 
>>unjustifiable hardship ("undue" hardship or "burden") are 
>>effectively identical in Australia, the U.S., and Canada, if not 
>>elsewhere, and the case of Maguire vs. SOCOG will inevitably come 
>>into play as precedents for legal cases worldwide.


Meanwhile:

>At 07:08 AM 10/30/2001 , Hewitt, Denise wrote:
>>   Actually, it was the Sydney Olympics that got me into accessibility. At the
>>time, there was a story posted on Slashdot about how IBM wanted some
>>exhorbitant amount of money to go back and add ALT tags. (it got a LOT of
>>press at the time, from what I remember).
>
>As a factual correction, it was rather that IBM wanted some large 
>amount of money go to back and make the site accessible. Let's not 
>oversimplify things to say we _only_ mean ALT attributes when we are 
>really talking about overall site accessibility.

What the complainant Bruce Maguire asked for was:

>>1. That SOCOG include alt text on all images and imagemap links on 
>>the Web site
>>
>>2. That SOCOG ensure access from the Schedule page to the Index of Sports
>>
>>3. That SOCOG ensure access to the Results Tables on the Web site 
>>during the Olympic Games

While this is more than alt text, it is less than "overall site accessibility."
-- 
         Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org | <http://joeclark.org/access/>
         Accessibility articles, resources, and critiques ||
           "I do not pretend to understand the mind of Joe Clark"
           -- Larry Goldberg

Received on Tuesday, 30 October 2001 13:33:45 UTC