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Re: EC proposes rules to make government websites accessible for all

for

From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Dec 3, 2012 3:56PM

Birkir, you've made a good point.
People with disabilities do more than just read web documents.

In regular work settings for example, they also write, read, and edit MS
Word documents; crunch the numbers in Excel spreadsheets; create and review
Powerpoint presentations; and other software-related tasks. These are all
native files from which PDFs and websites are created.

So when we leave documents of all kinds out of the accessibility guidelines,
we prevent this community from being involved in creating these documents,
which is just as important as accessing and reading them. MS Office
documents should be just as accessible as PDFs and websites.

But more importantly, one action puts the author in an active position of
creating and distributing content, while the other has him in a passive
position of merely receiving the content.

To me, this is a huge oversight by the WC3, the WAI and their WCAG, and our
government accessibility agencies. They're only addressing part of the
issue.

-Bevi Chagnon
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-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Birkir R.
Gunnarsson

I certainly don't want to start obsessing over PDF or some such, but it
bothers me that the proposed directive does not seem to address, in any way,
the accessibility of documents (text or forms) available through these
websites.
Of course I'd prefer all forms in HTML, but the reality is that PDF is used,
to quite a large extent, for electronic forms/applications for services or
announcements, and various file formats are used for longer text, ranging
from Word documents to epub.
WCAG 2.0 actually has some excellent definitions for accessibility that can
be applied to pretty much any technology, but it is made for the web, and
when talking about websites being WCAG compliant, I believe that does not
indicate that any documents downloaded from such websites need to be
compliant with any accessibility standard.
Cheers
-B