"Reaction [beta]"
New Dutch accessibility law 17 Jan 2007
Peter-Paul Koch reports on a new Dutch law concerning the quality of government websites (link leads to Dutch language content).
The law came into effect on 1st September last year and mandates that every government website be made accessible - referencing 125 guidelines that site owners must implement in the process. As Koch explains, these guidelines go way beyond the W3C's WCAG, embracing modern, standards-compliant web development best practice as a whole. For example, every website built for a government agency is required by law to use:
- valid HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0
- CSS and semantic HTML and separation of structure and presentation
- progressive enhancement
- the W3C DOM (instead of the old Microsoft document.all)
- meaningful values of class and id
- meaningful alt attributes on all images
Furthermore:
- scripts that work on links should extend the basic link functionality (think accessible popups)
- if a link makes no sense without a script, it shouldn't be in the HTML (but be generated by JavaScript)
- use of forms or scripts as the only means of getting certain information is prohibited
- removing the focus rectangle on links is prohibited
- information offered in a closed format (think Word) should also be offered in an open format
- the semantics of many HTML elements are explicitly defined
New government websites must comply with these guidelines, while existing government websites must adopt them before 2011.
This seems to be a really positive move by our Dutch cousins and provides a good indication as to how UK and other European legislation will develop over the next year or so
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1 comment so far
AJ 18 Jan 2007 01:44 AM
Finally! An accessibility law created by someone who actually knows something about accessibility.