[LINK] ACT Legislative Assembly Web Home Fails Tests

[Tom Worthington]

The ACT Legislative Assembly web home page is at: 
http://www.legassembly.act.gov.au/

This failed a TAW automated accessibility test (WAI guidelines, W3C 
Recommendation 5 May 1999), with 32 Priority 1, 107 Priority 2 and 23 
Priority 3 problems: http://www.tawdis.net/ingles.html

The site says at the bottom: "If you have special accessibility 
requirements in accessing information on this website, please contact 
the Assembly on 62050018 or send an email to...". Unfortunately this 
does not appear to meet the requirements of the Disability 
Discrimination Act, which obliges organizations to take proactive steps 
to make services accessible.

The ACT Legislative Assembly home page also failed a W3C Markup 
Validation Service test, with 174 errors in the HTML: 
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.legassembly.act.gov.au%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

It also scored 0 out of 100 on the W3C mobileOK Checker: 
http://validator.w3.org/mobile/check?task=2011101822282057.mobile1&docAddr=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.legassembly.act.gov.au%2F

While there is no legal requirement for web pages to meet these web 
standards, it is more likely that those using Assistive technology, such 
as screen readers for the visually impaired would have problems as a 
result of failing to correctly code the web pages.

Also as more Canberra citizens are using mobile devices for web access, 
it would be useful if the ACT Assembly took a few simple steps to make 
their web pages more usable on such devices.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards 
Legislation

Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/