Last year the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission agreed that Bruce Maguire, a visually impaired man, had been unfairly discriminated against because of the lack of accessibility of the official Sydney Olympics Web site. He was awarded damages of AU$20,000 and the site was forced to make significant changes in the month before the Games started.
Access Testing Centre (ATC) claims its consulting services could have ensured that the unique needs of visually impaired users were incorporated into the original Web site design.
"Accessibility is both an issue of technological compliance...and design compliance," Dr John Eklund, head of ATC's Usability Division, told ZDNet. "And no technological tools are going to assure accessibility."
-The successful court action against the Sydney Olympics Web site last year should be a warning to all providers of online services...Accessibility is an issue that Internet content managers, and particularly e-commerce developers, cannot afford to ignore."
ATC, which has been providing quality assurance services to the IT industry since 1995 and developing experience in the accessibility arena for some time, currently works with a number of corporates, government entities, universities and small developers to get their Web site accessibility up to scratch.
-We've got organisations coming to us and saying 'what do we need to do?' and we advise them what the first steps are."
As Web accessibility standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are being adopted in legislation and practice around the world, including Australian government Web sites, developers and business managers have a growing need to be aware of what the standards are and how they can be incorporated into business practices and Web site design, according to Eklund.
-Designers often think that accessibility will have a negative impact on the look and feel of work they have done, but this isn't necessarily the case," Eklund said. -Accessibility principles aim to make the Web more universal and do not necessarily restrict the type of designs that can be used. What's more, the potential for added traffic and improved ease of use of websites that comply with standards makes good business sense."
