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Re: WCAG and various Laws

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From: Denis Boudreau
Date: Mar 30, 2010 4:15PM

Hi Geoff,

On 2010-03-30, at 4:56 PM, Geof Collis wrote:

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

W00t! And here I was, thinking that I never win anything. ;p

AODA is "only" WCAG lvl A? Really? That's too bad.

Come to think of it, in terms of video, we only aim as high as lvl A also. Everything else is lvl AA, with a few little things from lvl AAA when they felt important.


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

I do have links, yes, but only in french. I doubt it will ever get translated, at least with government funding.

Someone's bound to do it eventually. I might at some point, as some people have been asking for it already. I doubt Google Translate would do a good job, but until then, this is all we got...

The standard is divided in three normative documents : web sites (SGQRI 008-01), downloaded documents (SGQRI 008-02) and multimedia (SGQRI 008-03).

Here they are :

SGQRI 008-01: <http://msg.gouv.qc.ca/normalisation/standards/accessibilite/siteweb/index.html>;
SGQRI 008-02: <http://msg.gouv.qc.ca/normalisation/standards/accessibilite/doc_telechargeable/index.html>;
SGQRI 008-03: <http://msg.gouv.qc.ca/normalisation/standards/accessibilite/multimedia/index.html>;

There is also a summary of everything if you land here: <http://msg.gouv.qc.ca/normalisation/standards/accessibilite/>;.

I'm not sure the PDF versons are accessible yet, but it's part of the plan to make them accessible.

This is the official verison dated october 2009. We expect to deliver the final version in the upcoming weeks. It should then be adopted by our Treasury Board sometime before the summer if all goes well.

If you guys are interested, I'd be more than happy to keep you posted on the whole thing as it evolves.

Take care,


--
Denis Boudreau
www.twitter.com/dboudreau



> 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
>>
>>