Another Australia Day has passed, and with every year my patriotism seems to grow. We opted to go to the Bassendean fireworks this year, and what a great time it was. A HUGE fireworks show, great friends, and a thousand or more Australian flags waving in the wind.

I’m proud to be Australian, although some of Australia’s past and very recent actions need some serious evaluation and apologies. I’d like to think Australia wasn’t the racist nation we hear in the media, but these entries in Wikipedia make it hard for us to defend our land.

I can only hope that the general world population don’t judge a country by it’s minority or past misdeeds, however I think I am being too optimistic.

There’s a lot to be proud of in Australia, we’re a tolerant, friendly people with a ‘fair go’ mateship national personality – I think we need to work hard to prove it again.

There’s hundreds of Australia Day photos on Flickr.

Photo: Fire twirlers at Australia Day celebrations, Bassendean WA.

New Australian creative magazine, OnVoiceOver, have written an excellent article about Port 80, and my reasons for starting it. It’d have to be one of the best articles on Port 80 to date…well done.

If you’re reading this from another capital city besides Perth or Canberra, and want to take on the role of helping to set up a monthly creative drinks night – get in touch, or at least read more about Port 80.

Photo: My 2.5 year old daughter, Leia, at the beach in Busselton.

We all have a fair idea what web accessibility is. It’s that whole ‘web standards’ thing, the whole ‘better code’ thing, etc. We’re quick to put it in terms of technical code and even design, but what is it according to Australian Law? I thought I would do a quick study on what the legalese spin on web accessibility is in our country.

The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 doesn’t specifically state anything whatsoever to do with the web. That’s what happens when you have laws written in 1992, way before what most people would consider the popular introduction of the internet in Australia. That’s cool, because we still have laws going further back, so it isn’t a complaint.

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission website has two good pages on accessibility for the web, according to Australian law. These are the well written World Wide Web accessibility and World Wide Web Access: Disability Discrimination Act Advisory Notes pages.

Neither of which really give me any ammunition to discuss with my clients and colleagues how to avoid legal ramifications, such as Bruce Lindsay Maguire v Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, AKA the ‘famous SOCOG website case’.

There’s even a handy email template for making a complaint about an inaccessible website on the Blind Citizens Australia website. They even have an Eight Steps to Web Accessibility page, which is not bad reading.

Seems that besides a few dozen sites, both government and NGO, linking to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and giving their own versions of what these mean, there’s nothing overly concrete to say this is what a website needs to do/achieve in order to meet their legal obligations.

Am I wrong? All help warmly received.

Photo: DSS-43 at Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex.