• Interior of
the Swedish
Parliament
building.
May + June 2010
[ 6] Handisam. “Do
the EU member
States Comply
with Accessibility
Guidelines?” November
2007. http://www.
handisam.se/Tpl/
NewsPage____927.
aspx
interactions
ally modified their tools to meet the Verva criteria
in a better way. The driving force should be to not
do wrong, rather than being the best. Similarly, the
European Internet Accessibility Observatory (EIAO)
will be evaluating website accessibility across
Europe and reporting the results on a regular basis.
The basic idea was that regular and frequently
updated assessments of accessibility indicators
published online would help to raise awareness,
fuelling the efforts for better solutions.
As an example of the importance of regular
evaluation and reporting, Handisam, the Swedish
Agency for Disability Policy Coordination, and
Funka Nu, a major private company that supports
Swedish organizations and authorities, conducted
an accessibility evaluation of government and par-
liament websites across EU member states [ 6]. The
study verified if those websites conformed to the
WCAG. Sweden was ranked first in terms of acces-
sibility compliance.
In Sweden the transparency of the public sec-
tor is one of the foundations of democracy and the
development of an accessible society and is mani-
fested by a duty to publish and promote openness.
However, with the increasing degree of electronic
information, transparency in the public sector is
severely challenged. For example, currently a civil-
ian can demand only paper copies of a public docu-
ment. A person with vision impairment, however,
might have difficulty with such a method, if he or
she does not have access to assistive technology
that can scan paper documents.