> -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] > On Behalf Of Craig Henneberry > Sent: Friday, 26 June 2009 1:46 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: RE: [WSG] accessible free web hosting account > > Andrew Stewart wrote: > > >Most people > >would love to make every website 100% accessible to everyone. However, > >if it costs a lot of time and money, but returns very little revenue > >from the small number of users with screen readers, then why should > >companies bother?
[...] > Besides, Australian law makes web accessibility a mandatory > requirement. Have you heard of the "Bruce Maguire vs. SOCOG" (Sydney > Organising Committee for the Olympic Games) case of 1999? If every company really were equally punished for making an inaccessible website, there would be something majorly wrong with our law. I agree with Andrew that there are certain lines that need to be drawn in regards to how feasible it is to make a website accessible. Just imagine every business in Australia that doesn't have wheelchair access would be punished by law for being inaccessible! None of the little stores would ever have a chance to meet this requirements and it would be ridiculous to expect otherwise. Of course we could also say that "A shop that is accessible using assistive technology (a wheelchair) is more accessible to its wider audience". But really, the expenditure would far outweigh the benefit for the small stores. Yes, a line needs to be drawn. A government or publicly funded website needs to be of course accessible, as much as can be expected (this could be interpreted as being WCAG 2.0 Level A compliant. Or Level AA? Or Level AAA?). But let's take the example of small companies creating a free service website. Let's assume somebody creates this really cool web application that is just awesome and does amazing things. And he or she offers it for free to the community, because that's just the type of person they are. Should they be punished for having a web service that is inaccessible? Are they being confronted with the options: make your site accessible or get rid of it? Is somebody going to sue them for offering a free service to the community that some of us unfortunately cannot access but others can? So you say that it's something different if it's a free web service. Let's assume there's a small, local shop that sells toys. They've been in business for many years, making just enough money to get by. The owner of the shop thinks it'd be cool to advertise their products online. So he sits down and makes a website in ImageReady. Yes, IMAGEREADY! It's all pictures, not a single ALT tag. But the website works, and he puts it online and it creates more income for him. Who's going to come and sue him for having a website that is inaccessible? Yes, of course it's easy for some of us to create accessible sites, but we need to be realistic here. For some organisations it is just not worth spending the time on making sites accessible. And the Australian law does take this into account. A website needs to be as accessible as can be reasonably expected. It was reasonable to expect that SOCOG would have a WCAG compliant website. It is not reasonable to expect that every Australian website out there is accessible, whether they sell products, offer services, or just provide John Doe's personal animated gif collection. So, coming back to the original question: who's job is it to ensure accessibility? The web developers or the assistive technology companies? The shop keepers or the companies that create wheelchairs? Of course it's a mixture of both of them. Companies that create wheelchairs try to make them as modern and useful as possible. It's the same for the companies that create other assistive technologies such as screen readers. And the web developers or shopkeepers try to make their stores as accessible as can be expected from them. If you go to a university building, you can surely expect there to be wheel chair ramps and lifts. If you go to the SOCOG website you can surely expect it to pass Priority 1 of WCAG 1. If you go to the Chinese Restaurant around the corner and there are 20 stairs and no lifts, then you will just have to go to another place to eat. And if you go to Fred's Toy Store website and none of the pictures have ALT tags, then you just go to another website that provides a better service. That's why we love the web: it's so large that there are good chances we will find what we need if not from one provider then from another. __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4198 (20090629) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [email protected] *******************************************************************
