Australia — The
man who sued SOCOG over Web site accessibility has warned
that rising complaints against government Web sites' use
of PDF documents are being made under commonwealth law.
Bruce Maguire, the disabled rights
advocate who sued the Sydney Organising Committee for the
Olympic Games for providing a site inaccessible to blind
people, said the government's trend towards online PDF
documents was attracting "a growing number of DDA
[Disability Discrimination Act] complaints".
Maguire liases with government in
his role as policy and project officer, disability rights
unit, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. He
has worked on Web accessibility with the Australian
Taxation Office, Centrelink, and the now defunct National
Office for the Information Economy.
Adobe's portable document format
(PDF), used by many government sites, remains relatively
inaccessible to the blind or visually impaired, Maguire
told attendees at the Web Essentials 04 conference in
Sydney last week.
"Software does exist to use these
formats," Maguire said.
"But the training required and the
financial freedom of the $1000 to upgrade to software to
read the documents is beyond most disabled people.
"It's the commission's view that
where PDF is used and the information is not provided in
an [accessible] alternative file format, the
organization is libel to action," he said. With the
support of the commission, Maguire used the DDA to claim
$20,000 in damages from SOCOG in 2000.
While it remains one of few high
profile Web accessiblity cases, many claims go unseen by
the public, Maguire said.
"I field many calls from distraught
Web developers asking why they weren't contacted before a
DDA complaint was lodged against them," he said.
"But there is no rule that you must
be contacted before a complaint is lodged."
The commission has a 'dialogue and
consultation' approach before pursuing legal claims of
'unjustifiable hardship'.
However, an organization defending
such a case today would stand little chance, Maguire
said.
"It's hard to see how a Web site
could succeed these days with a complaint of
unjustifiable hardship given the considerable amount of
information and techniques that exist for making Web
sites accessible."
A demonstration of the Web site for
the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet was
later shown as an example of over-reliance on image-based
information.
Maguire's claims come despite an
Australian Council of Government Ministers directive that
all government Web sites be accessible to people with a
disability.
