Governments and accessibility
The European Commission has issued a directive that public sector websites must be disabled-friendly by the end of 2015, a little over three years from now.
The directive is to be welcomed and sets out a good case for why website accessibility would benefit EU citizens, and suggests services which should be covered by this directive. It described the current public sector web accessibility as "dire" and said just a third of Europe's 761,000 public sector and Government sites are fully accessible.
However, welcome as this statement is, we should ask if giving three years is too generous a timescale to fix inaccessibility, and why it is even necessary for the Commission to issue this directive. Article 9 of the UN Convention on the rights of peoples with disabilities says member states should take measures to ensure access to information, including the internet. In addition, national laws such as Disability Discrimination Act 2005 require web accessibility and are founded upon the European Equal Treatment Framework Directive.
The real question is why European governments are not at the forefront of providing disabled-friendly services? We already have legislation that says this is required. Are governments not respecting their own laws?
17th December 2012