Accessibility not an option

I visited the Australian goverment website promoting Australia Day 2007 yesterday, and what I saw kind of made me question if Accessibility is still an issue anymore…

You see, as far as I understood it, if a site was created by the government and for the people, it needed to be accessible by everyone. First thing that strikes me when I hit the site is that it’s made entirely with Flash. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t accessible, but being the inquisitive sprite that I am, I gave it a go with the ol’ keyboard… and… well, nothing.

Nope, not a thing. No little yellow highlight boxes around active areas, no link for an alternative version of the content…. nothing. For those that don’t know, Flash movies can be navigated using the keyboard, and any hotspots or buttons , when tabbed to, will get a big yellow highlight box around them.

Now, i’m not suggesting that I am the guru of accessibility – I don’t even know if the shifty homepage can be navigated with your keyboard (Edit – it can be… as long as you first click somewhere on the Flash movie. In IE7, you don’t even need to do that. Just tab away!) – but one would assume that a government website would stick to its own rules. Especially given that even SOCOG was sued back in the day…

Ive done my fair share of government web work, and if sweated blood to make the most intricate of Flash animations accessible for as many people as possible – sometimes because it’s the law, and other times because it’s a nice thing to do. And in the long run, this Australia Day site is not the most important site in the world… but when a site is so blatantly a government-based website… the least they could do would be to hold the flag for the rest of us and set an example of how to do it properly.

Addition : Just read a post over at Quirksmode, and it seems that the Dutch Government are getting strict on accessibility… lets see if it’s all talk or if they are serious about it.