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Australia Orders Olympic Web Site Accessible to Blind

Posted by michael on from the in-the-dark dept.

Julian Assange writes "An article in The Age reports that the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission has ordered the Sydney 2000 Olympics organisers (SOCOG) to use ALT tags on all images and image map links on its web site. IBM who was contracted to develop the site, claims it needs a cool $2 million and a year to retrofit ALT tags to the entire site, including real-time score pages. But Simon Moran of the Public Access Internet Advocacy Centre says the modifications would cost only between $30,000 and $40,000 to implement. It goes without saying that changes would have cost $0 if IBM had correctly used ALT tags the first time around."

1 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. CAST's Analysis of the homepage by simpleguy · · Score: 5

    For those who care, CAST.org has a neat tool called Bobby which can analyse web pages and report their 'readability' for the visually impared.

    Please head on to http://www.cast.org/bobby/

    type in http://www.olympics.com/eng/home.html and send the request for processing.

    Interesting to note that, at this stage, Bobby does not report any automatically detected Priority-1 errors. But thats just for this specific page.