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Re: Standards for Accessible Laws?

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From: Noble,Stephen L.
Date: Dec 14, 2018 3:23PM

I would think the first thing would be to piggy back on the current efforts to implement United States Legislative Markup (USLM) XML: https://www.fdlp.gov/news-and-events/3560-united-states-legislative-markup-xml

Of course, I know the Brits have their own version...Crown Legislation Markup Language, but I don't know if other countries have their own. There are surely commonalities that can be mapped.


--Steve Noble

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From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > on behalf of Wolfgang Berndorfer < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2018 2:12 PM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: [WebAIM] Standards for Accessible Laws?

Does anybody know about specific standards of how to present LAWS
accessible?



Perhaps I was just unlucky, but I never found a law which was presented
according to WCAG standards, not even in Anti-Discrimination-Laws. No
heading is semantically a heading and no list a list.



So I searched for standards to advice governments and their technical and
legal departments how to make laws accessible. No matching results.



All the blind lawyers I asked, navigate from paragraph to paragraph via
CTRL+F. None ever complained. Seems they don't know how to use their AT
efficiently or they are too used to suffering.



So if there are no standards I suggest:



1. Provide an accessible HTML version of the law. PDF and other formats need
more effort and don't mean more comfort.

2. The title of the law in the document gets <h1>.

3. If the law contains sections, the heading of the section gets <h2>.

4. If the law contains sections, the heading of each paragraph gets <h3>,
otherwise <h2> .

5. The number of the paragraph and it's title are contained within ONE
heading element.

6. Titles for meta information's about the law like short- and long title,
abstracts in foreign languages, . get <h6>. Means: Only the pure law gets
the meaningful heading hierarchy.

7. Lists of articles within a paragraph are contained in a <ol> with the
fitting CSS list-style-type. (Or is this wrong, since CSS should not convey
content, like the number of the article?)

8. References to passages of the law or other laws are linked in an <a
href.>.

9. Tables, diagrams, . get the necessary accessibility features.



TX for infos & thoughts!



Wolfgang