Have you seen the e-Petitions section on the Prime Minister’s website? It was launched in November last year (2006), and is still in beta test, but it’s attracting a growing number of electronic petitions.
One which may be of interest to you was submitted by Ian Fenn and reads:
“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ensure that any website launched by the government complies with accessibility standards (WCAG AA at least).”
See http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/govaccessibility/
It continues with the following detail:
“In June 2006 the DTI launched their new website. Despite an approximate cost of £200,000, the website failed to meet basic accessibility standards. In short, this meant that the information on the website was inaccessible to some UK citizens - this is absolutely inexcusable. Further work (requiring further taxpayer money) was promised to bring the website up to Level AA of the Web Accessibility Initiative. The purpose of this petition is to ensure that all future government websites meet basic accessibility requirements from launch.”
Interesting, seeing this come up, that we’ve also just been copied in on an email complaining about the accessibility of this e-Petitions section of the site, so if any of you feel like wandering over there and having a look around, we’d be interested to hear what you think of it.
Wouldn’t do any harm to sign the petition while you’re there, too. :)
Post a comment