Web Accessibility: Overview of Laws and Guidelines
These days IT companies all over the world, Microsoft included, are putting in a lot of efforts to ensure that their products conform to necessary Accessibility standards. This blog article aims to touch upon the context and the business case for IT companies to be educated about Accessibility.
The movement towards making IT products accessible has been primarily driven by the legal framework put in place by several countries to ensure equal access to governmental services.
As mentioned in my previous posting, historically, many societies and governments have implemented disability policies that focused on isolation and segregation of people with disabilities. This had to do with several factors including ignorance, neglect, superstition and fear. The disability policies and laws have considerably evolved over last few decades to focus on rehabilitation, education and ‘mainstreaming’ of people with disabilities particularly with regards to access to technologies.
One of the first few initiatives in this direction was The United Nations World Program of Action (adopted in December 1982). The action program sought the equalization of opportunities for persons with disabilities and mandated that access to information and communication be a human right.
Across the globe, there are now public policies and laws protecting the rights of people with disabilities to access the content of the Web. For IT companies this is a very important change because the onus of understanding the relevant laws, guidelines or standards that must be complied with is on the agency responsible for developing the Web content and Web site.
In general the framework of laws and guidelines can be organized around statutes and regulations, treaties and public policies, industry codes, technical recommendations, and good practice guides.
- A statute is an act of legislation, as opposed to law generated by case law or judicial opinion. For example, in US the specifications for accessible design have been mandated through legislation (Workforce Investment Act 1998 that strengthened the Section 508 of Rehabilitation Act).
- The corresponding regulations are rules issued by government agencies to carry out the intent of the statute. Again, using US as example, the above mentioned legislation authorized the U.S. Access Board to enter into rule-making and the publication of the Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards on Dec. 21, 2000. These standards became effective from June 21, 2001
Statues and related regulations inherently tend to be country specific. What if one is developing a website for an entity in a country that does have accessible design laws? And what does one do if your country has a public policy or has signed on to treaty requiring web accessibility but provides no guidance on implementation? For such cases, remaining sources of guidance, like industry codes, technical recommendations and good practice guides are useful.
- A treaty or public policy is only as good as its implementation requirements. Currently a new international treaty is under development to protect the rights of people with disabilities. Accessible information and communication technologies (ICT) treaty is a core component of UN efforts and attempts are being made to add specific technical requirements for implementation. When the treaty is finalized, the countries that are affected will either need to enact legislation for conformance or harmonize their current laws to conform to treaty requirements.
- In areas where treaties do not exist, there is technical guidance that may be useful. One example is the Industry Code by Australian Banker’s Association (ABA) and its Industry Standards for Accessibility of Electronic Banking
- Even the technical standards developed by W3C sponsored WAI fall under technical recommendations category. Released in May 1999, it has been adopted by many countries.
U.S. Section 508 is based on the W3C WCAG 1.0 version. Rather than adopt the WCAG standards directly, the U.S. has taken the approach of creating a separate legislation. Majority of Web Section 508 rules are based on Priority Level 1 of the W3C WCAG but there are some rules that are additional to the WCAG guidelines. Because of the Law enacted on August 7, 1998, U. S. Federal agencies and entities subject to Section 508 must make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. Many states and local governments in US are also actively pursuing programs that involve adoption of Section 508 rules.
About 25 other countries have web design laws and policies. They include UK, Countries of European Union, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Thailand and New Zealand among others.
