This is my sarcasm voice

[trouble]

One day, I'm going to write a post about Canada that does not make a snide comment about the government going to court to demand the right to keep their websites inaccessible to screen readers.

Some day.

Today is not that day.

Latest:

You can find the contact information for your Member of Parliament here, but be aware that, like all Government of Canada websites, this one may not be accessible to screen readers.

(One of my goals is to really make people aware of how many resources are just not available to people if they can't bloody well get on a government website. The other one is to keep that fact really clear in people's mind: The government is going to court and spending your tax payer dollars to discriminate against PWD.)

(Honestly, I don't think the government in question actually matters: The websites have been inaccessible for a very long time, pre-dating our current minority government. I don't think this is a party-related issue so much as a "What, blind people? on the internet? how stupid is that?" issue.)

Comments

[rescuedinsanity.com]

Thank you for this. All of us need to think about this a whole lot more.

[silveradept]

Should there be someone making serious Argh about this as a possible Charter violation? There's got to be some leverage there somewhere.

[trouble]

That's what the court challenge is to determine. The government's argument is that the Charter isn't violated because the information is also available by phone.

[silveradept]

Which is pretty useless to the person that can't see and doesn't have assistive tech in making their telephone calls. And that is willing to sit through the menus and the likelihood of outdated information on the recordings.

Yeah. However poorly done it is in implementation, at least we have accessibility laws on the books for government resources.