Re: Accessibility policy announcement in Spain

Hi Jukka,

When one speaks of "liberalization" in the mark of the General Law of
Telecommunications, they are referring to the telephony. It doesn't have
anything to do with the accessibility of the Web.

On the other hand, I agree with you in that the WCAG is not prepared to be
part of the legislation. But like you will be able to see in:
http://www.sidar.org/recur/direc/legis/espa.php
the Spanish law that is in charge of of the accessibility of the Web of the
Public Administration says:
"The Public Administrations will adopt the necessary measures so that the
available information in their respective pages of Internet can be
accessible to people with disability and of advanced age, in accordance with
the approaches of accessibility to the content generally accepted ..."
That is to say, it doesn't make an appointment any concrete text. Anyway,
the application of our laws should be based on a "Norma" (standar) and Spain
has a Standar of Computer Accessibility that includes the accessibility in
the Web:
http://acceso2.uv.es/aenor/sc8gt3 /

Anyway, I agree with you in that it is not enough with the legislation to
get that the Web of the Public Administration is accessible. I believe that
it is very important that Manuals of style or Manuals of good practical
exist, that can be applied by those in charge of the administration.

Best regards,
Emmanuelle

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 10:27 AM
Subject: Re: Accessibility policy announcement in Spain


|
| On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Alan Chuter wrote:
|
| > Setting out the objectives for his ministry in the coming year 2003,
Spain's
| > minister of Science and Technology, Josep Pique, declared that the
| > government will take the necessary measures to ensure access for the
| > disabled to new telecommunications technology.
| - -
| >
http://www.discapnet.es/graficos/actualidad/Servimedia/noticia.asp?txt_Titul
| > o=4027
|
| It seems that the original story says it even stronger: it explicitly
| discusses _legislation_, to be incorporated into the new
| telecommunications act (Ley General de las Telecomunicaciones).
| If I understood correctly, that law will mainly focus on
| liberalization (deregularization, or "simplification of regularization"),
| so accessibility would be something to be coupled with a rather different
| issue.
|
| There seems to be growing interest in making accessibility requirements
| (for public sites) part of legislation in EU countries. I have very mixed
| feelings about this. The WAI guidelines themselves are not suitable for
| use as part of legislation, and the US experience shows that when
| considering which parts thereof can be made into enforceable laws, many
| essential issues will be dropped. With a suitable army, authors can be
| forced to use alt attributes and noframes elements; but then they will
| obey the letter (say, alt="an image"), and never considered any
accessibility
| issues beyond what the Law says. On the other hand, when accessibility is
| just a recommendation, it's easily ignored, since they are compelling
| requirements and "real problems" to be considered.
|
| --
| Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 8 January 2003 06:21:48 UTC