CriticalTest

Law Watch

Your Website and the law

There are laws that go with the responsibility of owning a website. Some may apply to you, others not.

Under the current scope, most laws point to the same issue. Accessibility. Is your website accessible to those with special needs or does it alienate them? Try and answer these questions:

1. Can it be used in a "text to speech" (TTS) browser ?
2. Can it be read by those with colour blindness?
3. Does it require the use of a mouse to navigate?
4. Can the user adjust the text size?

Let us have a look at those questions in a little more depth.

1. TTS Browsers. There are not many of these browsers per se but there are a number of software utilities that have the ability to read a web page back to the user.
   A good example of a TTS browser is WeMedia. This browser also has a visual user interface but unfortunately, at the time of writing this document, it does not support Aural Style Sheets^a.
   A good example of a software utility that can read web pages is HomeSeer. This is the software we use.
2. Colour blindness. There are several degrees of severity for this problem, however changing a colour monitor into black and white mode will give you a reasonable idea of how your website holds up.
3. Try pressing "alt" and "q" if you have a keyboard or the equivalent task using any other device. this highlights that webpages need not be mouse only accessible. It should take you to here. validation.
4. Adjusting the text size on a page is very important for a huge number of visitors. There are two ways of doing this. The correct way is by adjusting the browser, the other is by switching style sheets. on this site you can do both. If you are using internet explorer, look at the toolbar at the top and select view > Text Size > Largest. The second way is to use a separate style sheet, select the link at the top of this page with the letter "A" on it and this will offer you the same page but with larger text.

At the top of this page I wrote some laws do not apply. this is infact quite true, however if you are bound by the laws of the Europe, UK, Australia and some of the US. They either do apply to you or wheels are in motion to make them so.

For the curious, the following links take you to some of the relevant law documentation and archives.

• Web Accessibility Initiative.
• National Office for the Information Economy.
• Disability Discrimination Act.
• State Policies for web accessibility (US).
• Web accessibility policies (global).
• Section 508 (US).

a = Aural style sheets. the presentation, positoning and layout of all pages on our websites is done by Cascading Style sheetsAural Style Sheets tell TTS readers to change voices and tones so a page may make better sense.