Institutional Web Sites and Legislation

The issue of accessible Web sites and legal arguments for providing them has seen much debate over the past eighteen months. In many countries across the world, anti-disability discrimination legislation has provided the acorn of an argument that service providers should provide their Web presence in a form that is accessible to the disabled community. However, like the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), and its associated guidelines, the providers, and indeed the designers, of the majority of Web sites have by and large ignored these arguments. However, following a recent case in Australia, there is now a very persuasive legal argument for including Web accessibility in the scope of anti-disability legislation in the UK. It is the purpose of this article to review these arguments, consider their consequences for the Web sites of Higher and Further educational institutions and, finally, to consider how the recent Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 might extend these duties further.

Sloan, Martin. TechDis (2002). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Persuasive Design