Open Road

In the aftermath of the Community Languages Online report I’ve had time to start teasing out my thoughts on web internationalisation and accessibility as it applies to government information in community languages.

Web accessibility is well entrenched in federal and state governments’ web standards in Australia. Generally web developers understand the need for web accessibility. Government departments and agencies require web accessibility and will make the effort to get their websites to comply with accessibility standards.

This seems to work smoothly in monolingual environments, but there is a fracture point. Looking at Australian government websites, it becomes apparent that key aspects of web accessibility (and its relationship with web internationalisation) is only superficially understood.

In a future post I’ll discuss two particular federal government websites. For the moment I’ll concentrate on my understanding of web accessibility as it applies to content in community languages.

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