[html4all] Jack Pickard Article: Accessibility: Making it All Worthwhile

[Harry Loots]

The Jack Pickards of this world - including the people in this room;
especially those based in the UK - may soon have some help from Her Majesty's
Government - 

>From (UK) Public Sector Forums newsletter:

CoI MIGHT TAKE DOWN INACCESSIBLE WEBSITES
Our good friends over there have finally come up with a consultation document
about accessibility and they're certainly rattling some sabres. To our
knowledge it's not on the Cabinet Office website yet but you can grab yours
from here: http://www.publicsectorforums.co.uk/page.cfm?pageID=4185


The 2 most important items that come out of this report (from my perspective)
is (A and B):

A. 
Minimum level of accessibility
1. The minimum level of accessibility for all Government websites is Level
Double-A of the W3C guidelines.   Any new site approved by the Cabinet
Sub-Committee on Public Engagement and the Delivery of Service (DA(PED)) must
conform to these guidelines from the point of publication.

2. Continuing standalone sites must achieve this level of accessibility by
December 2008. Websites which fail to meet the mandated level of conformance
shall be subject to the withdrawal process for .gov.uk domain names, as set
out in Naming and Registering Websites (TG101).


and further: 
B. 
Software accessibility
24. It is possible for full applications to be delivered via the web and
served to the user within a browser, so it may be necessary to consider
guidelines and standards that specifically relate to software rather than web
content. In order to build an accessible website, authoring tools must produce
content that upholds web content accessibility standards. This is especially
important if the organisation will be using a Content Management System (CMS)
to produce content automatically. This must be taken into account during the
procurement of authoring tools and CMS.

25. So that content authoring is possible for people with the widest range of
abilities, it is also important that the interface to the content authoring
tools or CMS is also accessible. Accessibility criteria must therefore be
specified in the choice and procurement of these systems, in the same way that
accessibility is taken into account when commissioning websites.


If you cant get access to this forum I could post a copy somewhere - perhaps
on HTML4ALL wiki?


Regards
Harry
mob: +44 (0) 794 034 3919

~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~
Good judgement comes from experience.
Experience, of course, is the result 
of poor judgement.
               - Geoff Tabin


---------- Original Message -----------
From: Joshue O Connor <joshue.oconnor at cfit.ie>
To: HTML4All <list at html4all.org>
Sent: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:24:08 +0100
Subject: Re: [html4all] Jack Pickard Article: Accessibility: Making it All
Worthwhile

> Hi Laura,
> 
> I don't know Jack ( I can't help but laugh at that as many would
> probably agree) but maybe we could get in touch with him  after the
> announcement.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Josh
> 
> _______________________________________________
> List_HTML4all.org mailing list
> https://www.html4all.org/wiki
------- End of Original Message -------