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Re: WCAG and various Laws

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From: Geof Collis
Date: Mar 30, 2010 3:57PM

Hi Dennis

At this point Ontario is looking to go WCAG 2.0 Level A only so you
got us beat. :O)

Do you have a link, hopefully in English that refers to your standards?

cheers

Geof


At 04:43 PM 3/30/2010, you wrote:
>Hey there,
>
>On 2010-03-30, at 3:55 PM, < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> > I find it interesting that in Canada web accessibility is being dealt with
> > on a provincial level rather than something that is uniform throughout
> > Canada. Let me know if I'm not totally understanding this.
> > Chuck
>
>Actually, it's a little bit of both.
>
>There is an accessibility standard on the federal government level
>that applies to federal government websites only (CLF 2.0/WCAG 1.0,
>to be updated to CLF 3.0/WCAG 2.0 in an upcoming version).
>
>There are also accessibility standards on the provincial level that
>will apply to a variety of websites, depending on the province you look at.
>
>In Quebec for instance, we have SGQRI 008 that pretty much means
>WCAG 2.0. It applies to all government and agencies websites.
>
>In Ontario, it's AODA, but I'm not sure exactly what it aplies to
>yet, I haven't had a chance to really look into it, but I hear it
>will cover a wider spectrum than the Quebec standard.
>
>I'm guessing other provinces also have something cooking, but I have
>yet to check that out.
>
>Obviously, from my answer, I guess it shows I'm from Quebec. ;p
>
>The politics are pretty special up here so it's no surprise that
>there would be different standards depending on which governement
>level you're looking at. Not sure it's actually helping the cause,
>but this is how things are usually handled up here.
>
>As far as I can tell, there isn't really anything that's actually
>uniform across the country, may it be a11y standards or whatever, as
>the french- and english-speaking communities are from pretty
>different cultural backgrounds.
>
>Appearently, we all feel special enough to want our own thing... for
>better for for worse.
>
>For instance, an unified canadian standard would allow us to speak
>on behalf of a close to 40 million people market. That amounts to a
>pretty interesting number. Like a larger state for the US I guess.
>
>In Quebec, we only represent a 7.7 million market share. We saw how
>much that "cripples" us when our government tried to put pressure on
>Adobe two years ago for a french version of Acrobat. We barely got
>their attention, let alone changed things.
>
>We may even had more effect last week at CSUN we three of us got
>down at the Adobe booth to talk difrectly to Adobe's Accessibility
>Team. Politics wouldn't help at all.
>
>Hope this helps,
>
>--
>Denis Boudreau
>www.twitter.com/dboudreau
>
>