Web Accessibility Initiative: New Dutch Law on accessibility : Mobile Edition

Published on 2007-01-24 06:37:59

I was reading on Peter-Paul Koch's blog about the latest Dutch accessibility Law, an excellent initiative I find from Dutch government to adopt web standards in Government websites and will be certainly adopted by some companies also. I worked with general recommendation before from Government asking for example a certain number of pages, a general layout of the website, but always keeping the choice for developers to choose the best technology to realize it. I find it really interesting here that the recommendations focus on web standards and accessibility. The new law require that Government websites 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

meaningful alt attributes on all images

I don't know if there is a translation somewhere of the document, because it's difficult to understand in details the different points that the new law introduce and how it treat them. An excellent experience that you should read about if you are interested into web accessibility and standards adoption by Government.

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