2007 PhD Thesis Final Revised.pdf - Curtin University

ace information for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Part of his complaint was that
the information available on the official Olympic Games web site was inaccessible,
primarily due to the use of images without text descriptions. Some of these images
contained important navigational information about the site which could not be
interpreted by the text-to-speech software required to access computing and Internet
information. After contacting SOCOG, Maguire discovered that were no plans to
rectify the situation. As such, the issue regarding the inaccessibility of the web site
was raised with the HREOC in early 2000. Maguire’s argument was based largely
on the premise that the inaccessibility of the web site breached Section 24 of the
DDA of 1992, which stated that it is unlawful for a person, when providing goods,
services or facilities to “…discriminate against another person on the grounds of the
other person’s disability…” (Carter, 2000). Maguire believed that the web site
should comply with the W3C accessibility guidelines which would ensure
accessibility to the required information (Refer to Appendix C for a full list of the
guidelines).
After an examination of the W3C guidelines, the HREOC narrowed down the
initial complaint to three specific requirements to be modified on the Olympic
Games web site. The requirements were as follows:
1. that SOCOG include ALT text on all images and image map links on the web
site
2. that SOCOG ensure access from the Schedule page to the Index of Sports and
3. that SOCOG ensure access to the Results Tables on the web site during the
Olympic Games (Carter, 2000).
In response, SOCOG acknowledged the importance of such requirements but
argued that the implementation of such requirements represented unjustifiable
hardship, a concept discussed earlier in section 4.4. This argument was based
primarily on the number of web pages that required changes, the cost involved and
the short time left before the commencement of the Olympic Games. Specifically,
SOCOG stated that due to the amount of data required for 37 sports and the number
of databases that contained such data, it would be a difficult task to implement the
changes. SOCOG felt that due to the “…6,000 pages and approximately 55,000
pages…” (Carter, 2000) that were to be generated from the “…1,295 templates…”
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