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Bruce Maguire lodged a complaint with the Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) under a law called the Disability Discrimination Act. (News article.) 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.

To respond to the objection that this case, having taken place “far away” in Australia, is unrelated to Web design in other nations, we would suggest examining the similarities among the Disability Discrimination Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Canadian Human Rights Act, not to mention provincial, state, and territorial human-rights codes. The legal principles of unequal treatment (“discrimination”; “unfavourable” treatment) and unjustifiable hardship (“undue” hardship or “burden”) are effectively identical in Australia, the U.S., and Canada, if not elsewhere, and the case of Maguire vs. SOCOG will inevitably come into play as precedents for legal cases worldwide.

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The SOCOG decision explains what is and is not attainable and blows common excuses for inaccessible Web sites out of the water.

For content creators, the lesson of this case is simple: Accessibility is easy, it is not optional, and if you keep ignoring it you may someday find yourself in court. If an organization as powerful as a national Olympic organizing committee – with effectively unlimited resources and, on the part of its paterfamilias, the International Olympic Committee, a century-long history of exclusion and inaccessibility – can lose a case like this, other cases resting on similar legal principles are likely to prevail.

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The National Federation of the Blind filed a lawsuit against America Online, charging that it has not moved with sufficient vigor to make its services fully available to sightless users ("Lawsuit: AOL Ignores Blind", Reuters/Wired.com, Nov. 5, link now dead). AOL is a big business, of course, but there's no reason to think that accessibility obligations under the ADA do not extend all the way down to many "mom-and-pop" ISPs, applications providers, online magazines and journals, e-stores, and so forth.

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The National Federation of the Blind has sued AOL claiming that the AOL software violates the Americans With Disabilities Act because it is incompatible with many voice recognition software programs. These programs allow people to control their computers with their voices rather than a keyboard. If web pages are correctly formatted, the programs can also read aloud the text on them.

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In addition, other similar ADA suits have resulted in favorable outcomes for disabled plaintiffs with respect to Web site accessibility.

In November 1999, the National Federation for the Blind (NFB) sued America Online after AOL failed to alter proprietary software to allow compatibility with screen readers. AOL agreed to make the next version of its Internet software accessible to blind users.

Then in April 2000, NFB sued the Connecticut Attorney General's Office -- which had provided links to four inaccessible online tax filing services on its Internal Revenue Service's official Web site. The four tax filing services agreed to make their Web sites accessible to the vision-impaired in time for the next tax season.

October 15, 2002, a federal district court in Atlanta ruled that a mass transit agency violated the ADA by constructing a Web site that was inaccessible for people with visual disabilities. This is one of the first cases to decide that the ADA requires online access for people with disabilities. Although the Atlanta case focuses on other provisions of the ADA relating to a public agency's provision of services, the court nonetheless recognized that the transit agency's responsibility extended to its Web site and Internet services.

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Tesco Access - Case Study:
Tesco was the UK’s first grocery chain to invest in an accessible online shopping site called Tesco Access. It cost £35,000 to develop. It was calculated that if all 1.9 million visually impaired adults in the UK (estimate at the time of launch) purchased just one average trolley-full of shopping through the new site it would be the equivalent of £161 million of business.

Financial Rewards:
In the UK alone disabled people have an annual spending power of £50 billion. Making your website accessible to disabled people and people using alternative browsing technologies makes good business sense.

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If more businesses have to pay money, they are more likely to get the word out in the business community about the need to comply with the ADA. Mr. Molski truly thought he would only have to spend a couple of years advocating for compliance with access laws. He naively thought that a few lawsuits would persuade other businesses to take action and remove barriers. Instead, what Mr. Molski and others are finding is that most business owners think a lawsuit is what happens "to the other guy." The business owners believe that, since they haven't been sued in the past 14 years, there's a real good chance they won't be sued for another 14. So why spend the money now?

I have become accustomed to the attacks by business owners who do nothing to comply with the ADA and then cry "foul" when they're brought to task.

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I think talking about dangerous pathways, public transport, and voting machines is a distortion of the issues.

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Accessible sites don't have to be boring looking

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This is simply unachievable.

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This is the key phrase that is often misunderstood in accessibility discussions,

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render as readable

not the same necessarily, but informative; maybe without the pretty fluff but perfectly usable for the user's purpose. Sometimes designers forget that they are designing for users, not themselves.

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All this disability access stuff is a bit like health and safety "legislation"; technofanatics, zealots, bullies, little Hitlers, bureaucrats, the lazy etc all use it to support whatever it is they do or mainly, don't, want to (have to) do.

Most disability/health & safety strictures are, like pub statistics, made up on the spot to suit an argument.

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designer/developer lacks the imagination, creativity and technical knowledge

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there's a professional at work

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Most disability/health & safety strictures are, like pub statistics, made up on the spot to suit an argument.

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I'm just trying to make my website open to as many people as possible. I'm not going to please 100% of people 100% of the time but I'm trying.

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on what's wrong

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my site is hideously out of date btw. Even though that version is only 6 months old, I've learnt a hell of a lot more since uploading it! Accessibility, usability, semantics - it's all a continously evolving area.

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But what about the grammar and spelling?

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And if you think a sensible business will ignore or antagonise the majority to go after an £80bn market in an economy bigger than £1000bn then, again, I can't agree with you or share your experience.

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That's what spell checkers are for

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If you believe that 15% to 20% of the population is disabled to the extent that their ability to use the internet is affected to the degree that special provision needs to be made for them then you are living in a different country.

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That's what spell checkers are for



You think? Have another look

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As an aside it's interesting to note that 15%-20% of the population (allegedly) apparently controls only 8% of the economy?

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You won't find tons of pound notes under the matresses of the disabled. They spend their dough in pretty much the same proportions as the rest of us.

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Economic and social exclusion
* A recent survey revealed that one in six (15%) young disabled people said they had been turned down for a paid job, and told it was for a reason related to their disability or health problem
* 41% of disabled people of working age have no educational qualifications in comparison to 18% of non disabled
* Incomes of households with at least one disabled person are 20-30% lower than the incomes of all households

Disability and poverty

*
“More than 1.3 billion people worldwide struggle to exist on less than $1 a day, and the disabled in their countries live at the bottom of the pile” James Wolfensohn
*
“Unless disabled people are brought into the development mainstream, it
will be impossible to cut poverty in half by 2015 or to give every girl
and boy the chance to achieve a primary education by the same date -
goals agreed to by more than 180 world leaders at the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000” James Wolfensohn