24 August 2008
End discriminatory access to public documents
Disability Discrimination Commissioner, Graeme Innes, today called upon government departments and agencies to improve their adherence to government standards and legislation that requires them to provide equal access to public information for people with disability.
“This is about ensuring that people are not discriminated against on the basis of their disability when information – some of it very high profile – is released by government departments and agencies”, Mr Innes said. “Of all organisations, government departments and agencies know they should be making documents and information accessible to everyone."
The Commissioner said he was disturbed by repeated instances of important information published by government with little consideration of accessibility for people with disability.
“We've seen several important reports and papers published recently, all of them initially inaccessible to many people with disability – The Green Paper on Carbon Emissions Trading and the Grocery Watch website are two prominent examples”, said the Commissioner. “The Green Paper on Carbon Emissions Trading is over 500 pages long, but when I tried to read the PDF files with my synthetic speech software, it told me that there was one paragraph in those 500 pages - this made the document unusable because I couldn’t move from section to section.
“Making information as socially important and highly publicised as the Grocery Watch website and the Green Paper on Carbon Emissions Trading inaccessible to a significant sector of the population is, put bluntly, a disgrace.”
Commissioner Innes noted that, generally speaking, accessible versions of documents are eventually supplied when people ask for them, but this often takes weeks. "That's not good enough - people with disability have an equal right to participate in public debates about important issues, but they need to be able to get access to information when it’s published, not after the debate has moved on for everyone else.”
When documents are only put on the Internet in PDF format, it usually results in inadequate or zero access for people with disability. “You can use HTML, Microsoft Word, or RTF formats”, said the Commissioner. “It’s particularly depressing to see documents created in word-processor formats, which provide very good access, being converted into PDF, which doesn’t, then only being posted in PDF.”
Commissioner Innes noted that all Australian Governments have policies that commit their departments and agencies to complying with requirements for publishing information so that it is accessible, including the requirements of the federal Disability Discrimination Act.
"I'm not telling government publishers that they can't use PDF, but I am telling them that they must provide the same content in other accessible formats alongside the PDFs on their websites,” said Commissioner Innes. “I’m also telling them that, if this doesn’t begin to improve, we will start to name and shame.”
Media contact: Brinsley Marlay (02) 9284 9656 or 0430 366 529
