> -----Original Message----- > From: Neerav > sites > > > The more salient question would be whether corporates can be forced to > do so in australia, as SOCOG was a government corporation. AFAIK whether > australian corporates can be forced to comply to W3C/accessibility > guidelines is untested in the courts. > > -- > Neerav Bhatt
That is the question. I'm not up with all the cases over the last few years, but there is a community down in Florida that have taken a lot of commercial web sites to court. From memory, they had some wins, and then they started to get cases dismissed. I think they began to be seen as just perusing cases for the sake of it. I'm not saying that this is the case, but it seems to have been part of the perception. >From what I can gather from people working closely with the disability section of the community, it is not the way they prefer to work to get things changed and accomplished. They would prefer to work with people to change the approach without too much sabre rattling. Changing designers attitude to standards, like those on this list, is the way to success. At the same time, my own personal opinion is that just about any of the major corps are sitting ducks for anyone who wanted to sue them under this legislation if they were providing an essential service. If you go to the OZEWAI conferences, or the like, you will hear case after case of how the internet has made life easier for people with disabilities. They can now pay their bills online, order goods, and do many other things from their PC that would have otherwise required them to physically go to places to engage in purchases and do transactions. Some corps have the best of intentions, yet still remain clueless. Telstra are a case in point. Telstra put a lot of work into trying to make their standard templates usable and accessible, but because their standards department rely on poor tools like Bobby, they think their templates meet WCAG P1 when they don't. And if you are a Telstra contractor and try and tell them that, don't be surprised to see a move to have your contract terminated. The people at Telstra Research Labs have a great understanding of usability and accessibility, but these days their opinion is unfortunately not sought as often as it should be, if it was, Telstra would have far more usable and accessible sites. So even though Telstra think they have all this covered, they don't, and they could be sued. If they where sued, they would probably be incredibly surprised that such an action would happen. Just to highlight another point. Whilst I was on contract at Telstra, they outsourced a redevelopment of their Intranet publishing system. I was involved in sessions for the design by the usability company, but when it was finally produced and presented to a meeting of 450 Telstra developers and managers, the main outsourced development company boosted that it complied with WCAG P1 & P2 levels. I could see, just by looking at the interface that it didn't, and went up to the main team and told them it didn't. They assured me it did. I told them it didn't. To cut to the chase, 6 months later I found myself in their office applying for a job as a web developer to fix up this application that they had built for Telstra under contract to comply with WCAG1 P1 & 2, and to fix it to meet this level of requirement. The point I am trying to make, is that in the large corporate, government, and even EDU sectors, many of them think they have accessibility covered, but they don't. And a lot of this is because they rely on Bobby and it is such a sub standard checking tool. It's okay to use as a testing tools as long as you know it's shortcomings. I don't regard the people on this list in the same light at all. People here generally have a pretty good understanding of accessibility issues, and if you are following the basic principles of web standards design, you have most of this covered. In this post I am just trying to make a few points; 1) That there is probably a lot of opportunity to take corps to court, but the disability community are more tolerant than liturguous. 2) Big corps are basically pretty ignorant about accessibility (but this movement in design is probably the best thing to begin changing that). http://www.w3.org/WAI/Policy/#Australia http://www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/index.html http://www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/faq/f.a.q.html ___ Geoff Deering ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ Proud presenters of Web Essentials 04 http://we04.com/ Web standards, accessibility, inspiration, knowledge To be held in Sydney, September 30 and October 1, 2004 See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
