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Government concerns about enhancing web accessibility
30 - 09 - 2001
The Government has been dedicating efforts to enhancing the
accessibility of its web sites and promoting the awareness of
web accessibility to non-government organisations and the community.
A spokesman for the Information Technology Services Department
(ITSD) said today (September 30) that the Government attached
great importance to making web sites accessible to all groups
of people in the community including those with disabilities.
He also noted that the Government's Inter-departmental Committee
on Information Dissemination through Government Homepages had
issued web page guidelines, including guidelines on web accessibility
to all government bureaux and departments since 1999.
"The guidelines serve as reference to enable government bureaux
and departments to improve and enhance their web sites so as
to facilitate people with disabilities to access government
web pages.
"Our target is to enhance at least half of the government web
sites within 2001 and the rest within 2002 to enable people
with disabilities to read and obtain information from government
web sites in an easier way.
"With the assistance and co-operation by all government bureaux
and departments, we are confident that we can achieve this target,"
said the spokesman.
As one of the government activities promoting the importance
of web accessibility to people with disabilities, the ITSD and
the Social Welfare Department jointly organised a seminar on
how to improve accessibility of web sites last Friday (September
28).
The seminar was aimed at introducing to webmasters and web pages
designers of non-government organisations and related parties
the usability and accessibility considerations in web site implementation.
It also highlighted the obstacles encountered by visually impaired
people in surfing web sites and how they could make use of assistive
tools to access Internet web pages.
Through the sharing of successful experience in enhancing the
accessibility of web pages in the seminar, it was hoped that
people would be more aware of the necessity and method of producing
web sites accessible to people with disabilities.
Earlier this year, the Government has conducted a survey on
the accessibility of web sites of a number of public agencies
and government-subvented organisations.
Results of the survey are encouraging as more than half of those
web sites were already accessible to people with disabilities
or had been scheduled to undergo the necessary enhancement work.
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