Sensory impairment

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WA Government announces WCAG implementation timelines

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The State Government of Western Australia has formally announced that it will aim to achieve WCAG 2.0 ‘A’ or ‘AA’ compliance by the end of 2013 across the whole wa.gov.au domain.

The types of websites that fall under the requirements include public facing websites, intranets and extranets. While ‘A’ level is the minimal requirement for these sites, the government has identified ‘AA’ as the preferred option. 

The WA strategy is based on the Federal Government’s National Transition Strategy (NTS), which will aim to have WCAG 2.0 ‘A’ compliance by the end of 2012.


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Hearing date set for JetBlue Accessibility Case

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A date has been set for the hearing of the disability access case against JetBlue Airways, with the airway asking the magistrate to dismiss the case.

The case was brought against JetBlue Airways in October 2010 for the inaccessibility of their website and airport check-in kiosks for people who are blind or vision impaired.

The hearing is set for 22 July 2011 in the federal house in San Francisco. Further details about the court hearing are available from the Law Office of Lainey Feingold.

JetBlue is not the only travel website that has accessibility issues.


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Florida State University sued for inaccessible eLearning system

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Florida State University is the latest US institution to be sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act for failing to provide learning materials that were accessible to two blind students.

The students, Christopher Toth and Jamie Principato, were unable to access homework and tests in a mathematics class because the eLearning system, eGrade, was incompatible with screen reader technology.

Furthermore, students were required to use small remote-control ‘clickers’ to answer multiple-choice questions during lectures, which were also not accessible to Toth and Principato.

The students’ case was filed with help from the National Federation of the Blind, which has filed similar accessibility complaints against other institutions.


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Top 5 web accessibility pitfalls

Followers of the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) working group and Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Interest Group would have seen a number of emails recently on software packages that claim to be all-in-one web accessibility solutions.

While last month’s column highlighted some useful tools, there is no single tool that can provide a definitive evaluation of a website’s accessibility or make a website accessible.


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