EC calls for law on web access for disabled

The European Commission has proposed legislating to ensure that all EU nations adopt accessibility rules to make it easier for disabled people to access to the internet.

Last week, Viviane Reding, the Information Society and Media Commissioner talked about introducing a 'European Disability Act’.

UK anti-discrimination legislation that guarantees the rights of disabled people is derived from the EU's Equal Treatment Directive. However, the main UK law on disability, the Disability Discrimination Act, is unusual in Europe because it created a duty of web accessibility that applies to private and public sector web operators.

There have been criticisms over the years about major UK retailers and social networking sites not abiding by accessibility guidelines; although some moves have been made to address this problem.

Ms Reding’s proposal would force EU member states to adopt web accessibility rules at the same time so all websites were uniformly accessible using the new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG).

This is a set of technical standards written by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They are designed to ensure that websites are constructed in a way that makes them accessible to disabled people by being structured in certain ways and being compatible with assistive technologies.

Ms Reding said: "We cannot achieve the single market by leaving aside certain parts of our population. I am talking about e-accessibility: 15 per cent of our population is disabled and our rules on accessibility are still fragmented."

Reding said that the Commission would publish a European Digital Agenda in March 2010 that would contain more details of its proposed actions.

Struan Robertson, a technology lawyer with law firm, Pinsent Masons, gave a cautious welcome, saying while the idea of web accessibility was a good move; however he warned that the wording was “ambiguous”.