FYI EU webmasters

FR Speaking and other EU

[henry0]

News for EU Web masters
I was up to yesterday in EU and found that in a FR newspaper (Le Figaro):
Within 3 years all public sites (public VS restricted access)
Should be sight impaired accessible as per article # 25 on equality rights law
There is already a label “AccessWeb” that can be displayed upon certain conditions defined by “Braillenet association”.
That label has three levels from “Bronze” to “Gold”
Also the FR admin electronic development agency has a law targeting only the State public administration
For once! The article mentioned how of a great example the USA are showing in offering sites that are accessible to sight impaired persons.

Sites to review (all three are in French):

[braillenet.org...]
[accessiweb.org...]
[adae.gov.fr...]

[edited by: trillianjedi at 4:40 pm (utc) on Mar. 9, 2005]
[edit reason] Linking URL's and fixing the broken one.... [/edit]

[pmkpmk]

As far as I know, this only applies to the public sector, not to "public websites" as such. So if your are a webmaster for a public-sector website (e.g. www.city.be or www.government.fr) then you have to implement this. It might also count in public tenders, if you want to sell your products to a public authority or federal office - but only as one criteria among others. It does not generally apply to www.mycompany.com

On a sidenote: designing a website barrier-free usually is an improvement in code-cleanup, size and overall delivery speed of the page.

[henry0]

You are correct about the public sector.
However, the three label levels system(if I am correct?) has been designed also for any kind of sites
in the same way many proudly display a W3C logo.

[henry0]

Hmmm, I guess it would be a good idea to shift a bit that thread theme

The new question being: What do you do to be sight impaired friendly?

[pmkpmk]

There's lots of ressources on the web for that. Clean, structured design, extensive use of CSS, use of "title" in all tags, etc, etc.

[Leosghost]

I spend quite a lot of time ( proportionally to my non existant free time ) installing stuff like "read please" for people here ..most are unaware that such progs exist ..or are only "pushed" them in the "this will cost you €2000.oo" and then the local software shop installs them the freeware version with a french language patch ..for €2000.oo...

Just came across a guy locally who has done 6 of these for local blind people ..10 min install ..€2000.oo to put in freeware ..scum of the earth ...

Will read the articles tonight when I've got more time ..thanks "HenryO" for the find ...

[superbird]

British webmasters might want to research the disability discrimination act. Shouldn't be too bad as they take into account the size of your business if they decide to investigate you (probably unlikely) so a one man band wouldn't have to do as much accessibility work as yahoo.co.uk for example.