New Dutch accessibility law

On 1 September last year the new Dutch law on the quality of government websites went into effect. At the time I read a short note on a Dutch blog that the new law made accessibility mandatory, nodded sagely, decided it was about time, and went on with my work without actually looking at the new law.

It was only last Friday that I studied it in detail, and to say that I was pleasantly surprised would be an understatement. The law's stated purpose is to make sure that every Dutch government website is accessible by following the guidelines as formulated by W3C. In order to do so, a corpus of 125 guidelines has been created to define best practices for creating accessible sites. These guidelines go way beyond WCAG; they also embrace modern, standards-compliant web development as a whole.

A few examples will show you where Dutch government accessibility is heading. As of 1 September last year, every website built for a government agency is required by law to use:

valid HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0

CSS and semantic HTML and separation of structure and presentation

progressive enhancement

the W3C DOM (instead of the old Microsoft document.all )

) meaningful values of class and id

and meaningful alt attributes on all images

Furthermore:

scripts that work on links should extend the basic link functionality (think accessible popups)

if a link makes no sense without a script, it shouldn't be in the HTML (but be generated by JavaScript)

use of forms or scripts as the only means of getting certain information is prohibited

means of getting certain information is prohibited removing the focus rectangle on links is prohibited

information offered in a closed format (think Word) should also be offered in an open format

the semantics of many HTML elements are explicitly defined

New government websites must comply with these guidelines. Existing government websites must be converted to the new guidelines before 2011.

Sounds good, doesn't it? The Dutch accessibility law has been created by people who know quite a bit about accessibility.

In fact, last Tuesday I had a meeting with two members of this committee to discuss slight changes in the Site Survey script that's treated in chapter 6 of the book. The committee members impressed me with their factual and detailed knowledge of modern, standards-compliant web development. It was perfectly possible to discuss accessibility, usability, JavaScript use and popups on a level that wouldn't be out of place on an international Web conference.

The guidelines' one slight accessibility problem in an international context is the lack of translations. Currently they are only available in Dutch.

A pleasant secondary effect of this law will be the gradual removal of New Amateurs from the circle of web companies that work for the government. Fourteen months ago I discussed ways and means of converting the new amateurs, and proposed:

Could we arrange for economic pressure, for instance by lobbying for all government sites to require the use of CSS?

It seems the Dutch government has done exactly this. Thank you!

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