Manwah Design Weblog - Web Accessibility and UK Law

Wednesday, April 14th

Web Accessibility and UK Law

A List Apart has a good article looking at the new legislation regarding website accessibility for disabled users. This article makes several good points with regards to the Disability Discrimination Act.

Firstly the Act doesn't specifically mention websites, although the Code of Practice (PDF) does. Also, despite the fact the final part of this Act comes into effect in October 2004, the law about accessible websites previously came into force on 1st October 1999 and the code of practice for this section was published on 27th May 2002.

Secondly there is advice with regards to the action that the Royal National Instsitute of the Blind and the Disability Rights Commission are likely to take, along with links to resources about accessibility such as can be found on the RNIB and W3C websites.

This issue has been highlighted by the BBC which reports that an investigation into websites shows that over 80% are unusable by disabled people. It is worth checking the ALA article to see the full analysis and links to further resources.

Manwah on 04.14.04 @ 09:25 PM GMT [link]

Tuesday, April 6th

Email by Google

After an oddly timed press release on April 1st, Google have promised that their new Gmail launch is no April Fools. In my cynical opinion, this is Googles first attempt to build brand loyalty and to put barriers in the way of people from switching to other search engines.

However, it sounds like an interesting proposition with 1GB of free storage with some contextual based advertising thrown in by the same technology behind Adwords. One of the issues to have arisen since the announcement is over a possible breach of European privacy laws.

If you would like to find out more about Gmail before it is opened to the general public, read the entry on testing the new email system by Sean Palmer over at Miscoranda.

Manwah on 04.06.04 @ 03:21 PM GMT [link]

End of an Era

Following the switch of results at AlltheWeb over to the new Yahoo! search engine (as noted by Pandia and Search Engine Showdown), it appears that Altavista has finally followed suit.

It's a shame that AV appears to have lost some of its advanced syntax options, although both Babelfish and the multimedia databases are still accessible. This grand daddy of the current crop of search engines is where a lot users (and seo's) first came into contact with the brand new world of search on the Internet.

Hopefully Yahoo! will stick by its promise and continue the brand, using it to test some new features in the future.

Manwah on 04.06.04 @ 03:05 PM GMT [link]

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