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 04:27:25 UTC