On 8/24/2011 10:29 AM, karen.cony...@immi.gov.au wrote:
Hi Mike,
Please forgive me if I am being repetitive as I have not read
all of the replies to your question.
I have worked in commonwealth government for several years, so
can only give you a perspective from that angle. All
commonwealth and State Government departments must now comply
with the National Transition Strategy which was released by
AGIMO in June 2010 (available from the AGIMO site). Most
Government agencies have teams working on becoming compliant
with the Strategy.
That I am aware of, the ATO, Immigration and Centrelink have had
Usability centres, labs and Accessibility teams for many years
not only to enable ease of use of their web sites and web
applications by people using assistive software - both
internally (employees) and externally (clients) - but making
them generally more usable to all members of the community and
staff.
Regards, Karen Conyers
 "Mike Kear"
<w...@afpwebworks.com>
The conclusion I am coming to, with 5 days since I asked
this and no-one
actually saying they do ANYTHING to cater for people with
disabilities, is
that even after all this time, no one really spends much time
thinking about
users with special needs, other than to code to standards and
hope that does
the trick.
No one either agreed or disagreed with the proposition that
sticking to
standards IS in fact enough.
I asked this question, wondering if someone would say 'yes we
have a
usability lab' or 'we have a consultant who runs our sites
through his
screen reader for us' or 'we have meetings before launch
specifically to
discuss' or something. But no one has said they do anything at
all for
users with disability.
The only responses I've had to this question are people
referring me to
documents on line that I found long ago with google. I was
interested that
none of the people who gave me those URLS (except Josh Street)
said they
actually used the advice in the documents themselves. Josh
wasn't specific
about how he caters to people with special needs, but seems to
speak with
some knowledge so I'm assuming he caters to Dyslexics in his
designs.
I guess it's going to take another law suit like that one
against the
Olympics2000 site to get anyone to take users with special
needs seriously
and actually lift a finger to cater to their needs.
The conclusion I'm being forced towards is that developers are
basically
saying that users with special needs will have to swim for
themselves and
it's up to them to find some software of their own to get
around all the
obstacles the A/Bs put in their way. I'm glad at least
property developers
have been forced to change that attitude.
I offer web accessibility consulting as a part of the services
provided by CPK Web Services.
The tricky part with web accessibility is all the user generated
content now a days, Youtube is a good example of this, they should
provide audio description of all the videos uploaded but some how
I don't think that will happen anytime soon.
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