Thailand Information And Communication Technology Policy Framework

The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) assists Ontarians by “developing, implementing and enforcing accessibility standards in order to achieve accessibility for Ontarians with disabilities…”. This act creates a standard that must be met through all facets of society. Whether it be in an in-store customer experience, in the workplace or online, AODA lays a framework that will assist in the day-to-day lives of Ontarians with disabilities. This act greatly impacts the IT field, in that it changes the way IT professionals utilize technology, in order to assist and accommodate disabled citizens. Disabled Ontarians occupy a significant population within all of Ontario, “15.5% of Ontario’s population has a disability and this

Today, we are so accustomed and dependent on technology to communicate and inform our world (Bentley, 2014). According to Australian Bureau of Statistics (2017) Australia has a population of 24.7 million people, only 14.2 million of those people have access to the internet. That means that over ten million people in Australia, a young but well-developed country don’t have access to the internet. Nicholas Negroponte created a non for profit initiative called one laptop per child, in hope to continue to minimise the digital divide, this initiative has now rolled out in Ethiopia, Mongolia, Peru, Mexico, Rwanda and more. Technology is such a big part of our education system so what happens when some of our students don’t have access to basic

Usability is a critical portion of web design that one must be ever mindful of when constructing websites. Whether creating a personal web space or building multiple pages for a large corporation, it is the burden of the designer to guarantee people can access that content. According to the United Nations, disabled people compose roughly 10 percent of the world’s population (United Nations, 2010). Many regulations and standards have been set forth to provide disabled people with the same opportunities to access content available on the World Wide Web, as it is most of the World’s population.

To ensure, users do not experience any issues particularly with users with disabilities when accessing the website, the guidelines set by W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the most broadly adopted Web accessibility standard. They are set a set of guidelines that specify how to make content accessible, including devices. The guideline covers many areas, including alternatives for auditory and visual content, navigation mechanisms, ensure that documents are clear and simple, design for device independence, and many

In addition, many requirements definitions could have been fixed, pre-launch. Firstly, developers need to work on the accessibility of the website. In the earliest stages of the website creation, they should have made sure that the UI was input properly and people with hearing, vision, and learning

The web designer must also use multimedia formats that have synchronized captioning to also aid disabled users access the interface freely and holistically. This is crucial and of great importance in section 508 as users should be able to access all information on the site freely and with minimum effort.

The world as we know it has changed drastically in the past three decades, we are slowly but surely morphing into a worldwide community dependent upon computer technology. More specifically we rely on the Internet heavily for everything in our day to day lives. The benefits of expediency and the convenience afforded to those who utilize information systems their business dynamics is undeniable.

This may be harder than it looks. For many people the internet may be their only way of communicating, working, and everything else they may not be able to do like the rest of the world. I would even say that peoples with disabilities may depend on the internet more than people without disabilities. On top of that, many government agencies have switched to a paperless, virtual environment. This saves both money and time. With that said, that can make it even harder for peoples with disabilities to take care of their day to day business. Joseph J. Lynett and John A. Snyder for the American Bar Association (2013) write, "As it appears the DOJ is preparing to issue standards governing web accessibility under the ADA, covered entities should assess with their IT professionals and attorneys whether their websites are accessible to individuals with disabilities and whether doing so would as a legal matter pose an undue hardship or fundamentally alter the nature of the goods or services provided. Based on the assessment and any accessibility barrier discovered, covered entities should map out a plan to make their websites accessible even in advance of the looming regulatory action from the DOJ. Covered entities whose websites are inaccessible to individuals with disabilities may be the targets of lawsuits filed; therefore, it behooves employers to review the accessibility features of their websites and Internet-based services consistent with the accessibility issues outlined above." (para

Websites are used by people with all abilities; a visit to the Royal National Institute for the blind (RNIB) gives an insight into people with visual

A website is used by different people for different uses. Each website can be evaluated for its usefulness by the general public based on certain criteria as discussed in this article.

According to the Australian Department of Social Services (2012), web accessibility is not just about making sure websites are usable for those with disabilities’; it is about making sure that a website can be used by as many people as is possible. This could include making sure websites are accessible for people on a variety of different devices, those with impaired abilities, the elderly, and people from a different cultural backgrounds who may struggle with the native language (W3C, 2005). Websites that are designed to be accessible are generally much more usable for everyone, not just those who may need certain accessibility features (Riley-Huff, 2012). It is important that websites are as accessible as possible not only to allow them

Developing Web contents involves shaping and making many choices involving technical, aesthetic, and usability concerns. With the expanding technical options for communication on the World Wide Web, it is tempted to focus only on issues such as hypertext markup language (HTML) syntax, page layout, or the latest and flashiest technologies. However, there needs to be a broader approach in order to articulate the information content that is to be conveyed. There is also a need to pay attention to the characteristics and qualities of the Website as a medium for communication so that there are not merely duplicate practices intended for paper and other media.

Scapin and colleagues [53] define Web Usability Guidelines (WUG) as “statement[s] ensuring some adequacy of a particular user interface of a website with respect to a particular context of use where a given user population has to fulfill interactive tasks with a given system”. WUG has been used to extensively evaluate health websites and some PHR both for seniors and younger adults [56, 57]. A Popular WUG is the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Guideline also called the Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG). It is a universal guideline aimed at ensuring that web content is accessible to people with disability (age related or not). A more senior specific guideline is the checklist from the National Institute of Aging and National Library of Medicine. Its principles are quite similar to the WCAG except for some exclusions which may or may not limit its usefulness (see Table

According to Americans with Disabilities Act and similar other laws and regulations in other countries often instruct equal access to computer systems for users with disabilities. There will be legal obligation to facilitate intranet use by disabled employees who may not be able to do their job if they cannot access their organization internal websites. Making the Web more accessible for users with various persons with disabilities is to a great extent a matter of using HTML the way it was meant to encode rather than appearance. As long as a page is coded for meaning, it is possible for alternative browsers to present the meaning in ways that are optimized for the abilities of individual users and thus facilitate the use of the Web by disabled

If the website is accessible that means that people with disabilities can use it. A blind person using a screen reader or a talking browser can navigate the information and interact with it. A deaf person will not have