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Re: INFO: Disney lawsuit

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From: Steve Green
Date: Feb 26, 2011 1:27PM

The UK has possibly the toughest laws in the world with regard to
accessibility, and it is certainly legal for some content not to be
accessible here. The nature of our law is that even if some content is
deemed to be illegal, it is only illegal with respect to the person who
brought the legal action. It is still legal with respect to everyone else.
That is about to change, as our new Equality Act has provision for class
actions (which the DDA did not), but no one has brought such an action yet.

Both the DDA and the Equality Act have the concept of 'reasonableness', so a
court may well decide that it is not reasonable to expect certain types of
content to be accessible. They may also decide that it is not reasonable
(usually on grounds of cost) to expect a content publisher to make certain
content accessible even if it is technically possible. Many factors are
taken into account, particularly the resources available (usually money) to
the content publisher to make the content accessible.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd