OTTAWA, Dec 01 The federal government has been given 15 months to comply with the Charter of Rights by making its websites accessible to visually impaired Canadians who want to tap into the federal job bank, fill in forms and apply for federal programs online.

A Federal Court judge issued the order Monday in a ruling that concluded the government breached Donna Jodhan’s equality rights by its “system-wide failure” to provide the same services to the visually impaired as it does to those who can see.

“She has been denied equal access to, and benefit from, government information and services provided online to the public on the Internet, and that this constitutes discrimination against her on the basis of her physical disability, namely that she is blind,” wrote Justice Michael Kelen, who found the government is not living up to its own 2001 accessibility standards.

In a rare move, Kelen said he will oversee implementation of Ottawa’s online retrofit and he warned that the court will intervene if the government fails to act.

Jodhan, a computer-savvy accessibility consultant who also tweets and blogs, launched a court challenge after discovering she could not apply for a federal job online, nor could she fill out the 2006 census.

“I went to court to catch the government’s attention because they were not paying attention to any of us when we said we could not access their websites, we could not apply for jobs, we can’t do anything,” said Jodhan, a Torontonian who has been blind since birth. “I think it’s sad that the government fought this for four years and a lot of taxpayers’ money was wasted.”

Kelen, in his ruling, noted that the government has about 146 departments and agencies that provide Internet programs and services. They include Employment Insurance, Canada Pension Plan, online passport applications, guidelines for starting new businesses, travel advisories and a website that permits job applicants to access applications to all federal job postings.

Canada used to be a leader in offering Internet access for the visually impaired, but it has since lagged behind its international counterparts, said Jutta Treviranus, a University of Toronto expert on adaptive technology, who testified at a September court hearing on Jodhan’s case.

“Canada has lost that position and seems to be slipping further and further behind,” she said Monday.

Treviranus said that it is neither expensive nor complicated to make the Internet accessible to the visually impaired, but that the government lacks the will.

Kelen said in his ruling that international reports on online accessibility give conflicting opinions on how Canada rates on the international scale.

The federal government argued in written court documents that federal services are available in other ways, such as on the telephone, in person and by mail and that it is unlikely that the Internet can be perfectly accessible to all, given that there are more than 23 million pages under the domain of gc.ca

Visually impaired individuals access the Internet using assistive technologies, such as “screen readers” that read content aloud, or “braille output devices” that convert content into braille, provided the pages have special coding to accommodate the software. Jodhan said that her screen reader cannot navigate many web pages.

The ruling noted there are “basic accessibility problems,” such as a lack of text descriptions to permit blind users to access video, and a failure to provide alternatives to several technologies, such as “flash,” which cannot be decoded by many screen readers.

There are about 800,000 Canadians who are visually impaired and John Rafferty, president of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, said that the federal government “above all” should be a leader and an example for the rest of the country to follow.

Rafferty said only 30 per cent of visually impaired individuals are employed and that the lack of online services is among the “huge barriers” they face.

Kelen said that Jodhan brought her case to court in the “public interest” and he, therefore, ordered the government to pay $150,000 to cover her legal costs.

There was no word on whether the government will appeal the ruling. Jay Denney, a spokesman for Treasury Board President Stockwell Day, said that the government, in 2007, updated its standards so that visually impaired individuals can use screen readers to access government sites.

Source: http://www.canada.com