Dec 3, 2008 Posted by Herko on Dec 3, 2008 in All things Web, Professional notes | 0 comments

Accessibility mandatory for all Dutch government websites

On Decem­ber 1 2008, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Dutch state, provin­cial, water­board and local gov­ern­ment signed a treaty called the National Exe­cu­tion Pro­gramme elec­tronic pub­lic ser­vice. By doing so, they for­mally com­mit­ted the entire Dutch gov­ern­ment to imple­ment­ing the Dutch Webguide­lines (among other goals).

There are inter­na­tion­ally rec­og­nized agree­ments for cre­at­ing web sites, known as 125 qual­ity require­ments stan­dards war­rants a sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter web­site. The Nether­lands gov­ern­ment has assem­bled these inter­na­tional stan­dards in a qual­ity model called the Web Guide­lines. This qual­ity model com­prises 125 qual­ity require­ments for the ben­e­fit of bet­ter web­sites.
The Webguide­lines aren’t new, they have been around for four years now. Before dec. 1 2008 how­ever, only cor­po­rate web­sites of the national gov­ern­ment were forced to con­form to the guide­lines. This changed dras­ti­cally: from now on, any new gov­ern­ment site needs to con­form, and by the end of 2010, all exist­ing sites need to con­form as well.

This means that we have two years to make the entire Dutch government’s Inter­net pres­ence acces­si­ble. It is a pow­er­ful sig­nal about the impor­tance of acces­si­bil­ity, as well as a huge chal­lenge to implement.

It seems I have my work cut out for me.

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