Table of contents:
E-accessibility standards
Many States have paid attention to e-accessibility ever since public services began to move online. The United States of America was one of the first countries to apply e-accessibility policies, by means of a 1998 amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 which became known as Section 508. The U.S. Access Board[1] later strengthened Section 508 in 2018, by adopting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.[2] It is worth noting here that the right to e-accessibility is closely linked to constitutional and legal rights. Another of the first countries to develop e-accessibility policies was Canada, which created its own e-accessibility standards in 2000 and further developed them as time went on. In 2017, Canada adopted WCAG 2.0. This standard is also followed by the majority of Arab States that were early adopters of e-accessibility. The initial versions of the WCAG 2.0 standard, adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), covers a wide range of recommendations for making web content more accessible.
[1] Section 508: https://section508.gov/manage/laws-and-policies#:~:text=Section%20508%20of%20the%20Rehabilitation%20Act%20of%201973&text=Under%20Section%20508%2C%20agencies%20must,the%20access%20available%20to%20others.
[2] Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/.