Spider Trax

Dutch Government Promotes Web Accessibility

In September 2006, a Dutch “Ministerial Decision” regarding the quality of government web sites came into force. As I understand it, a “Ministerial Decision” is not a “law” but is something a Minister can proclaim without needing to get approval from the legislators.

This particular document makes certain accessibility levels mandatory on all new government web sites and further demands that all existing sites achieve these levels by 2011. The document supports and endorses W3C guidelines but, suprisingly, it’s own guidelines go beyond WCAG 1.0 and are being hailed as a blueprint for modern, standards-compliant web development as a whole.

The stated requirements include:

• Separation of structure from presentation
• A ban against using deprecated markup
• Usage of Strict DOCTYPES
• Progressive enhancement
• The creation of semantic class and id values
• The use of the W3C DOM when scripting
• Script-only links generated by JavaScript
• A ban against using the alt attribute to create tooltips

An unofficial English translation of the document is also now available.

The only downside is that, although compliance is mandatory for all Dutch government web sites, there is no penalty for non-compliance.

With that in mind, and although I think this is an excellent initiative, I can’t help wondering whether it will go the same way as the UK government’s eGIF standards which were developed with the aim of getting all public services standardised and available electronically by 2005. Yet 2005 came and went. Two years later and many services still aren’t online – yet alone standards compliant.

Hopefully the Dutch initiative will be successful. Then perhaps we will see other governments following suit.