The Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) is facing claims that it discriminated against complainant Bruce Maguire by failing to make the official Olympics site (www.olympics.com) accessible to him, as a blind user of the Internet.
Maguire first made the allegation in June 1999 and although changes have been made to the SOCOG site -- which it is estimated will receive 1.4 billion hits during the life of the site -- he contends that the site remains largely inaccessible.
"SOCOG has refused to be reasonable and (Olympics Minister) Michael Knight has allowed them to do it," Maguire told ZDNet Australia.
"I had an expectation that because the Olympics Web site promised to be such an important site that the Web designers would take Web accessibility into account. However, large parts of the site are still unintelligible and inaccessible," Maguire told the hearing today.
Maguire told the hearing that "in the spirit of cooperation and conciliation" he was suggesting to SOCOG just three areas that would increase the accessibility of the site for individuals using screen readers if adequate changes were made.
Poor use of Alt-text
Maguire's first complaint is that the site should use meaningful Alt-text
(alternative text) tags on all images.
Alt-text associates text with an image, allowing screen reader software to give a description of the image to the user via synthesised speech or a braille display device.
Although Alt-text is common on Web sites, often tags do not adequately describe images.
Although SOCOG claims to have been progressively adding Alt-text to the site, Maguire told the hearing today that it has not been provided in all cases.
When asked by SOCOG's defence team to identify specific images that had no Alt-text linked to them Maguire pointed out that, "If some images don't have Alt-text I'm not even sure they're there." He did however point to individual pages of the Web site -- the opening page, sport schedule page and torch relay page -- where there were sections of the page he could not access, indicating images were there.
Link not available
Secondly, Maguire showed that a link to the sport index, which provides event schedule information for 36 Olympic sports, was unavailable.
SOCOG's defence team suggested an alternative way of accessing the sport index information was to type in the URL of each individual sport page within the browser.
"I find this totally unsatisfactory and totally offensive," Maguire said. "This just isn't the way a sighted person uses a site. When you're browsing Web sites you don't type in URLs, you click on links."
Maguire also pointed out that when he eventually accessed the sport index information it was in tabloid form therefore virtually impossible to access using a screen reader or a braille display device.
No sports results online
Finally, Maguire specifically requested that sporting results be
made available on the Web site during the Games. "Something which SOCOG claims will cost
AU$4 million and take 368 days to do," he told ZDNet Australia in an
earlier interview.
SOCOG's defence team suggested that Maguire can access Olympics results via television or radio broadcasts.
"That's provided I'm watching the TV when [results] are broadcast, or listening to the radio," Maguire said. And of the results broadcasted, Maguire pointed out, will likely concern major events.
We're not the only ones
SOCOG's defence brought it to Maguire's attention that SOCOG's
official Olympic site was not the only Web site that would be providing
information on the Olympics during the period of the games, suggesting
he could surf other sites for results information.
When asked by Commissioner William Carter if SOCOG knew if the results of Olympic events would be displayed on these sites, and whether in fact these sites were accessible to the visually impaired, SOCOG's defence team admitted it didn't know.
"It also raises the question that if this information if accessible on other sites, why isn't it accessible on your site?" Carter asked.
Net more accessible than print
SOCOG suggested to Maguire that Olympic sports results would be
available in print media. "Which I can't read," Maguire said.
Quick to come up with another alternative, SOCOG suggested the scanning of newspaper results.
"How does a blind person define what text to be scanned?" Commissioner Carter asked rhetorically.
Maguire came to the hearing today equipped with braille technology and gave a demonstration of how people with a visual impairment can access the Internet with the use of screen readers.
"I know enough about Web sites to know it isn't difficult to make the [Olympic] site accessible," he said.
By early afternoon the Hearing was still underway. It is expected that a result will be handed down next week. The hearing reconvenes on Friday.
August 9, 2000
