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The illegal argument really doesn't fly.

It very much flies.

If you think it does, please tell me how it could be prosecuted.

By an impaired user, or by a state body tasked with enforcing such a law.

So long as the actual server(s) and the company itself isn't/aren't in that jurisdiction, there is nothing that can be done from a legal standpoint except to write a polite letter explaining the issue and show them a better way.

Alternatively, if the disabled user and the company are in the same jurisdication, then they may be able to /sue/. Eg, see the UK legislation:

http://www.disability.gov.uk/dda/

Or the legislation in place in Ireland:

http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/2000_8.html

See the general EU site on disability discrimination:

http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/employment_social/di sability/index_en.html

And:

http://europa.eu.int/comm/employment_social/social _protection/index_en.htm

It is simply illegal to discriminate against impaired people when providing access to your services, in many jurisdictions, full stop. The EU is also active in seeing that all EU jurisdictions bring such legislation into place.

So yes, Irish and British companies would *definitely* be in contravention of existing law and risk civil suits if they used image based Turing tests, and I suspect as would companies in many other EU countries.

A lot of mass-market, public facing sites are horribly built and designed, and have clearly been built without any consideration to other browsers at all.

For instance, I (unfortunately) bank with The Woolwich, which has possibly the most pointless online banking service in the world.

The online banking site only works in PC IE and Netscape 4. I've emailed them a few times, and have only got a response once. My initial email was inquiring as to why I couldn't gain access to my bank account in Firefox/Windows, Firefox/Mac OSX, or Safari - god knows what *nix users are supposed to do. I also pointed out that under the terms of the Disability Discrimination Act, they are clearly and flagrantly breaking the law.

They only saw fit to answer my questions about Mac support, ignoring the wider browser, accessibility, and you-might-get-sued issues, but nonetheless, their response was hilarious :

Dear Mr xxxxx,

I refer to your recent email of dissatisfaction with the Woolwich Internet Bank.

Firstly, I would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused for not supporting Apple Macintosh with the Woolwich Internet Banking site. During the design phase of the current Internet Bank, we had every intention of supporting a range of Apple Mac systems. However, as the functionality of the Internet Bank increased, so did the complexity of the code.

Our Technical Team have recently conducted a full review of the Woolwich Internet bank, and to make our site Apple Mac compatible we need to rewrite all the code which sits behind the site. Due to the complexity and time/resource required, we have taken the decision not to support Apple Macs.

We have updated our site to reflect our decision, and this information can be located in the FAQ, and in the 'What you need' section within the Internet Banking hub.

Thank you for taking the time and trouble in writing to us. Your comments have been sent to the appropriate team to review.

Kind Regards,

Mark Robbins Technical Support Analyst E Commerce Technical Support SupportE-Commerce@woolwich.co.uk 0845 600 0999 (Option 1)

Which sounds very much like an admission of incompetence, no? "Our code was so vendor-specific and umaintainable that we'd need to bin it and start again. Sorry!"

It's worth bearing in mind that their site has been in this case for at least three years. What, that's not long enough to rewrite the clientside code of a relatively simple webapp. WTF are you people, monkeys?

I don't expect every site to cater to MY browser, but it sure does annoy me when a site works ONLY in some specific setup.

if you wanted purty, you wouldn't be using Lynx in the first place. :)

But the Disabilities Act does not require anyone except government agencies and a few other select public service entities to have assessable web sites.

Au contraire. The Act explicitly covers Access to Goods and Services, and successful cases brought under Part III concern a range of non-governmental bodies.

In fact, studying the actual text of the Act, we see specifically listed examples of providers to whom the legislation applies, including:

(f) facilities for entertainment, recreation or refreshment;

"Does having a site only working in IE make it inaccessible to handicapped?"

"But since when was it a matter of law to have a shit website?"

So... what kind of companies? All companies? Or just companies above a certain size?

In terms of the UK, feel free to read up on the law yourself. Or did you mean what should be the case? All the accessibility related laws I've heard about have some provision that it should be "reasonable" to provide services in an accessible manner.

And if all companies, you realise that screws small operations into the ground interms of their web presence costs.

Are you kidding? HTML is accessible by default. You have to actively screw up a document to make it inaccessible. The idea that accessible websites cost more to produce is an unfounded myth.

And if just above a certain size, what size? [...] Legislation should not be arbitrary.

Do you realise that the same argument would also apply to speed limits? Do you think the argument is valid?

I think you'll find that both British government guidelines and an EU directive means that this site is technically in breach of the law here as well.

The relevent legislation in the UK is the Part III of the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act. If I did what the UK Government regularly does online I could be fined, or worse. If the pointy-haired civil servants could just spend a day or so at the Web Accessibility Initiative then things might get better. Instead they produce specifications with wonderful advice, such as putting HTML attributes in alphabetical order.

I've contacted several Government departments about Web accessibility and have received mostly non-replies ("thanks for you comments, which have been filed") with some bogus replies ("but we'd have to make the whole site in HTML2!"). Quite sad, really.

"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
-Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996

Now you may not be aware of this, but in many countries, sites must be accessible.

• In the US, the Americans with Disabilities Act means that all federal services (and many state ones) must be accessible.
• In the UK, any site which offers a public service (nb this includes all online stores) must be accessible, thanks to the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act.
• In Australia, the Sydney Olympic Games Organising Committee were successfully sued for being inaccessible to the blind

With this going on, an IE-only web is going to get further away, not closer. The only way to be accessible is to ensure that basic HTML standards-compliant pages will allow users to access the basic functionality of their sites.

More info:

• Accessibility - more than the right thing to do
• Accessibility, the politics of design
• W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative
• Joe Clark (Web Accessibility advocate)'s blog
• UK government's position on web accessibility

Yes we do - the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act which came into force last October. In that, providers of public services (shops are specifically mentioned) are required to make 'reasonable adjustments' to make services accessible (ie providing services to the same manner and quality), or suffer unlimited penalties.

More info at http://www.disability.gov.uk/dda/fin alcode.rtf. This is the non-legalese Code of Practise resulting from the Act, rather than the Act itself.

Lawyers are currently interpreting this to mean that minimum compliance is Conformance Level A of the W3C Accessibility Guidelines.