Updating “Web Accessibility – Why Bother?”

I have begun work to update my post, “Web Accessibility – Why Bother?“, in the light of the Irish government finally ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD).

(Note: it only took our government 11 years from signing the Convention in 2007 to ratifying it in 2018. They have yet to ratify the “Optional Protocol”, which would enable Irish citizens to hold the government to account in terms of implementing the Convention.)

I wanted to get a list of all the countries who have signed and ratified the Convention, so I followed a link to a page on the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). This is the page I was brought to:

http://indicators.ohchr.org/

The only way the information I was looking for was displayed was in an untagged image map.

The upshot of all this is that I’ve just e-mailed the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights as follows:

Hi,

I have been researching the UNCRPD with specific reference to provisions for accessibility to digital information. I visited the following page to obtain a list of signatories to the UNCRPD and its optional protocol:

http://indicators.ohchr.org/

I could not find such a list accessible to a blind person using screen-reading assistive software, only an “interactive map”.

I hope you can appreciate the irony of being unable to access information relating to the right to access information! Can you please ensure that any information presented in a graphic is also presented in simple, accessible text? Otherwise, it could be embarrassing to the UNOHCHR!

Very best wishes

Isolde Carmody

Visually Impaired citizen of Ireland

You couldn’t make it up!