Accessibility Background

In Australia in June 1999, Bruce Maguire lodged a complaint with the Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) under a law called the Disability Discrimination Act. His complaint concerned the Web site of the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG), which Maguire alleged was inaccessible to him as a blind person. According to the complaint, Maguire, unlike most blind people online, does not use a screen reader to read aloud the elements of a Web page. Instead, he uses a refreshable Braille display. But neither technology can understand and turn into voice an image that lacks a text equivalent. Nearly all Web pages online have some kind of graphics, including high-profile sites like those associated with major sporting events. Maguire contended that significant parts of the SOCOG Web site, Olympics.com, were inaccessible to him. On 24 August 2000, the HREOC released its decision and supported Maguire's complaint, ordering certain access provisions to be in place on the Olympics.com site by 15 September 2000. SOCOG ignored the ruling and was subsequently fined A$20,000. Implication: Under the Disability Discrimination Act, “It is unlawful for a person who... provides goods or services, or makes facilities available, to discriminate against another person on the ground of the other person's disability... in the terms or conditions on which the... person provides the other person with those goods or services...; or in the manner in which the... person provides the other person with those goods or services or makes those facilities available to the other person.” “The provision of the Web site was a service relating to the provision by the respondent of information relating to the largest and most significant entertainment or recreation event in the history of this country,” the decision holds. Creators and owners of websites may be deemed to be providing a service and therefore the implication is that unless they make 'reasonable' efforts to create or modify those websites to allow 'reasonable' accessibility for all, they are breaking the law. A reader's guide to the Sydney Olympics accessibility complaint A guide to accessibility can be found at Why Web accessibility? Accessibility Upgrade Project Aim: To redesign major aspects of The Curious Website so that disabled visitors might better be able to use the site both visually (colours and zooming) and aurally (text reading software). It was considered that site navigation was good and therefore in no need of changing at this time. Target 1: To ensure all images and other non-text page elements use the 'ALT' tag to allow a mouse-over text alternative for the benefit of text reading software. Timescale: End of April 2003 Progress: This feature was incorporated into the original site design and the site has now been fully checked over. Site Modification Working Hours: 2 Target 1: completed 26th April 2003 Target 2: To change parameters in the Cascading Style Sheets from absolute font sizes (px or pt) to relative font sizes (em or %) to allow Internet Explorer and Netscape users to easily zoom the text using; CTRL+mouse scroll-wheel (IE) or CTRL+'+' & '-' (Netscape) Timescale: Mid May 2003 Progress: This is somewhat of a learning curve. Although the initial changes to the CSS have been made it is proving difficult getting some of the text sizes right and has also involved going into every page on the site to bring every page in line with the CSS. Site Modification Working Hours: 6 Target 2: completed 28th April 2003 Target 3: To reduce the diversity of coloured text on the site overall to ensure produce a more 'readable' site in regard to the text and background colours used, yet without loosing the style of the site. It is planned to do this by simplifying the CSS and modifying each page to bring it into line. Long job! Timescale: Mid June 2003 Progress: A new Style Sheet was created and then each page (all 72!) was thoroughly updated taking out any odd codings which had crept in over the last 2 years of on-going site development, so that each page is now, as much as is possible, a standard design. Site Modification Working Hours: 8½ Target 3: completed 6th May 2003 Target 4: To allow visitors to be able to change all the text, on any page, to black against a light coloured background at the press of a key, and at a press of a key to change it back again. This will assist visitors who have a particular visual need as dark text against a light background is the easiest to read. Timescale: End of July 2003 Progress: After some considerable research on the web the closest I've been able to come is to supply a link on each page which will allow the user to swap between style sheets using Javascript. I got the code from CodeLifter. I would still like this to be activated by a key press, but perhaps that will come later. Every page needed modifying but the process was semi-automated with an excellent Java program which my son wrote. He's the programmer of the family! It was a great time-saver. Java program development Hours: 4 Site Modification Working Hours: 5 Target 4: completed 10th June 2003 Accessibility Upgrade Project Summary: Commenced: 26th April 2003 Completed: 10th June 2003 Total Hours: 25½ back to previous page or back to the beginning

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