| EOWG
Last updated 20 December, 2000, Judy Brewer
The policy links on this page are compiled as a resource by the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG). This page is not a comprehensive or definitive resource for all applicable laws and policies regarding Web accessibility. The information contained on this page is not legal advice. If you have questions about the applicability of the referenced laws to specific situations, please consult legal authorities in the appropriate jurisdiction.
This page is under continual development. Should you be aware of additional legislation or policies beyond those listed here, corrections needed, or developments related to legislation listed here, please contact <wai@w3.org>.
There are many reasons for making the Web accessible. These include advantages to business of reaching millions of people with disabilities in the Web marketplace; the carry-over benefits of accessible design for other Web users; and the advantage of complying with policies that require accessibility where those exist. The information on this page provides a starting point for locating relevant laws, regulations, policies, and government-related standards or guidelines which relate to Web accessibility; as well as information about efforts to initiate new policies.
The Web's emergence as a pivotal information technology raises interesting questions about application of existing law and policy to this new medium. There is a growing body of national laws and policies which address accessibility of information technologies.
While there are a number of potential ways to regulate accessibility of information technologies, these generally fall into three categories. Governments can establish that individuals with disabilities have a right to certain kinds of information; governments can require that products or services sold within a country must meet certain criteria for accessibility; or governments can require that information technologies and information services procured by entities such as government agencies must be accessible.
The first approach -- access to certain kinds of information by individuals with disabilities as a civil right, such as in Australia, Canada, and the United States -- is more common. However, sometimes we see combinations of these approaches, or, as in the United States, all three approaches in effect. Recently, as in Portugal, there has been legislation specifically focusing on Web accessibility.
There is also variety in the approaches that different governments take in establishing the detailed requirements for Web accessibility. Some governments have referenced WAI guidelines generally; some have specified the documents and the version number; some have written their own version of Web accessibility guidelines or combined these with general usability or best practices guidelines. W3C documents can be referenced by other organizations' documents under the conditions described in W3C's document use policy. Advantages and disadvantages of promoting a harmonized versus a fragmented accessibility standard are discussed in WAI's comments on the U.S. Section 508 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.