[LINK] Unlawful discrimination by National Archives of Australia

Tom Worthington Tom.Worthington at tomw.net.au
Fri Sep 28 09:32:46 AEST 2007


On Wednesday I received a message from National Archives of Australia 
inviting me to "Discovering Archives workshop - 26 October 2007". At 
first I thought this was image spam (a message with just an image to 
circumvent spam filters), but then noticed the NAA address. I 
contacted the NAA and found that what they had sent was an invitation 
to an event in the form of an image. When I looked closely at the 
image I found it did contain the details of an event in October. 
However, the text was difficult to read.

I suggested that the NAA include the text of such announcements in 
the body of the message as text. In this way the NAA will not be 
mistaken for a Spammer and invitations will be readable by the 
disabled. An email reply from the NAA agreed that details on the 
email flyer were difficult to read, particularly for someone who may 
be visually impaired.

Unfortunately the NAA's proposed solution, to increase the size of 
text in the image on future messages, missed the point. If you can't 
see an image, then making it bigger will not make it readable. Also 
making the image bigger will have disadvantages for Internet users on 
slow links.

AGIMO has guidelines on the design of web pages so they are 
accessible to the disabled 
<http://webpublishing.agimo.gov.au/Accessibility>. Failing to do so 
may breech the Australia's Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 
<http://www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/webaccess/>. While the 
AGIMO guidelines do not mention email, the general principles would 
appear applicable, as would the DDA.

To add insult to injury, NAA suggested that I could taken off the 
mailing list if I did not want to receive the messages. Clearly NAA 
have not applied best practice in this case and are not delivering 
services fairly, effectively or courteously and are not sensitive to 
the diversity of the Australian public.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml  




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