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Accessibility Legislation – an Insight

By Urte Meinhardt, Accessibility Competence Center, SAP User Experience, SAP AG – 06/07/2005

Note: This page is not intended to be a complete discussion of the complex issues on this topic, nor is this resource intended to be the "final word" regarding the changing regulatory and technological environment. This page should not be construed as legal advice or opinion on specific facts.

Today, access to Internet and Intranet is recognized as one necessary condition for participation in the information society including the work place. After years of research and development activities on access to the internet for people with disabilities, the W3C-WAI content guidelines have mainly been accepted as a general and global baseline for access in this domain by experts. Nevertheless a number of laws passed in recent years all focused on helping to ensure that people with disabilities will be able to continue to participate in different aspects of daily life and to use the products and services they encounter in their lives.

Some countries' policies specifically cover information technology and web sites (for example, Australia and the United States); others provide more generic accessibility coverage; still others cover only access to technology for all, with no mention of people with disabilities (for example, Argentina). Not in all countries policies are in place and the claim to protect disabled people is realized via public procurement instruments (like in Denmark). The variety is growing and threats that even though the intention of all this activities/ instruments is worthily finally the realization creates even more borders.

 

Countries

For the accessibility legislation of a specific country, click the respective link below.


Note: All countries are on one page – so you can scroll the page to see the legislation of different countries.

 

Conclusion

The variety of these legislations, policies and guidelines makes it more and more difficult to develop and offer products and services in international markets. The more the world moves closer together the more it gets difficult to build a framework that guarantees accessibility for everyone. With deviant regulations disabled people are more excluded from daily life than included. The intention of designing accessibility laws is promising against what the realization creates even more borders.

As a global approach the harmonization of standards offers an instrument to work against this trend. At the end there should be a stable common set of rules that are applicable in different situations country spanning and irrespective of language barriers. Redundancies are avoided and conflicts are not generated at all.

 

References

Please note that I cannot assure that the links below will work in the future.

Interesting Links

Please note that I cannot assure that the links below will work in the future.

 

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