- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2003 11:27:23 +0200 (EET)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
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