Disability Benefit Rights
Disabled people have certain rights and there are laws set out to ensure they are entitled to receive help and support to lead the best quality of life possible. The rights, laws and benefits they are entitled to differ from country to country.
Disability benefit rights in your country:
Australia

If you are disabled with either a physical, intellectual or psychiatric disablement that prevents you from working then you may qualify for disability support pension,

Access for the disabled
Despite many improvements over the years with more awareness of disabled peoples needs those impaired by disability still have trouble accessing certain places. Examples of this are shops, libraries and restaurants.

There is a law in place however that governs your rights to access; the disability discrimination act states that places have to make reasonable changes to make access better for disabled people.

Just as disabled adults have rights then so do children. Every country will have a different policy regarding those rights under there social services department but usually only the name is different.

In the UK there is a policy in place which is called “The Children’s Act”. This policy was designed to keep children safe and well and help to give a disabled child a better lifestyle in the home by providing services to meet the needs of the child.

Disability Explained

You are classed as disabled if you have a physical or mental impairment which causes a long term adverse effect in carrying out normal day to day activities. Normal day to day activities are such things as being able to feed yourself, take care of your personal hygiene, being able to shop for yourself and walking.

Usually the period classed as long term is at least 12 months but there are no hard and fast rules regarding this. It is classed as a substantial adverse effect when your abilities are limited in more than just minor ways and your inability will go towards deciding if you are classed as disabled or not by law.

Disability : Day to day activities

The disability discrimination act covers eight different kinds of ability, if one or more of theses are affected by your disability then your ability to carry out everyday activities is said to be affected.

Disability & The Internet

A study has recently shown that despite new laws under the disability discrimination act many websites are still inadequate when it comes to providing suitable access for those with disabilities.

Since 2003 the disability rights commission began testing websites to make sure they were complying with guidelines set out by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility programme. Of 1,000 sites tested 81% of them failed to reach the minimum standard of accessibility.

How Testing Was Done?

Testing was done running commercial available software on each of the 1,000 sites, testing included for example images on websites, such images on web pages should have what is described as an “Alt-tag” included for the use of blind or visually impaired people and is a text alternative which is a description of the image on the page.

The “Alt-tag” is read using a screen reader. Of the sites tested 100 of them were also tested manually by a disabled user group with disabilities ranging from dexterity impairments, blindness, partial sight, dyslexia and hearing impairments.

A large number of the websites which did have the “Alt-tag” feature were found to be wrong in matching the actual description with the image, for example the picture could be a cat and the description was dog.

Along with problems such as this the people testing also found many other problems such as cluttered and complex web page designs, confusing and disorienting navigation systems, and failure to describe images at all along with poor contrast between the background pages and content which made reading hard.

The research concluded that on average 8 instances of the guidelines put in place were being violated per homepage, and also found on average a potential 108 instances on the typical homepage where a disabled person would have particular trouble because of there disability.

Only 2 web sites out of the 1,000 tested actually reached the second highest level AA and not one of the sites tested managed to reach the top level.

When these findings where brought to light the DRC warned that hundreds of businesses may not be complying with equal access law for the disabled and that it was inevitable that they would face legal action from their disabled customers at some stage.

The Legal Obligation

The disability discrimination act states that it is unlawful for a provider of services to discriminate against a disabled person in failing to comply with its provisions.

Filed under: Disability & The Internet