no no no
Dear Garretts' Boss
Please can you excuse Garrett from work today as his post saying that the government SHOULD legislate about accessibility shows that the pressure of all this work you make him do has fianally cracked him up.
Yours, his loyal readers :)
Garrett you can stop logging on to every pc you can find and voting FOR government intervention it is still 90-10 against
Now for goverment web sites that are paid for by the elected government I don't care if they want them all to have pink text on a green background with a link to a site showing 20 ways to recycle road kill. The government pays for them it can do what it wants. But for the rest of us the government (all governments) can stay the heck out. Let business deceid what it wants to do based on its business sense(i.e money) and morals and and for the majority of private websites let them do what ever they want.
DO you seriously believe that Joe in Arkansas who puts up a page of pictures showing his daughter growing up, whose intended audience is just his mother who moved to Australia gives a fig if a blind person or a deaf person or an illiterate can read his site. NO his intended audiance is his mother. Now if she had a disabillity he would build the site to take that into account but why should the government have the right to tell him "You must put ALT tags in or go to jail"
Where does it stop. OK so the blind, deaf and illiterate can read our sites, but where does it go next. No one in China can read English (OK not true) so all web sites must be in Chinese, or Welsh is an official language in the UK so all websites must be in English and Welsh, or x% of American only speak fluent Spanish so..... (Yeah like Joe in Arkansas is going to translate little Megans school report into Spanish).
The next problem is how to legislate. US passes a law saying what All US sites must be xyz compliant. Is that: all servers physically located on US soil if so Costa Rica gets a whole new off-shore buisness; OR all .com addresses if so little Megans' Grandma in Australia who puts her pictures of Bondi Beach up on geocities.com for Megan to see will stick two fingers up and say yeah try and prosicute me; OR all web sites that enter a US ISP oh boy 2 million new cyber police; OR all US registered firms Welcome to Amazon.com registered in Brazil. Nope other than for government owned sites the whole thing is unworkable as a law. Now as a buisness and moral decission thats a different story but legislating Joe in Arkansas forget it.
Regards
Julian
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