Nanny has managed to hoist herself on her own petard, how sad!In 1995 the Disability Discrimination Act was passed. This act was designed to ensure that those people with disabilities were not unfairly discriminated against.
The spirit and the terms of the legislation were good. However, those that drafted it did not take into account the sheer stupidity and thickheadedness of Nanny's acolytes.
Nanny's jobsworth acolytes have started to act on the very letter of this law, rather than use their common sense when interpreting it.
The Metropolitan Police found itself in breach of Nanny's new interpretation only recently. The police's logo:
"Working for a safer London"
Had to be changed to:
"Working for a safer London"
Now do you see the subtle difference?
Yes that's right; the first is in italics, the second is not.
Why change?
Simple, according to Nanny's lackeys, italics are a form of discrimination against the visually impaired.
Nice to see the police spend time and money on the important things isn't it?
Anyhoo, it seems that Nanny's much derided party political slogan "Britain Forward, Not Back" is also in breach of Nanny's strict interpretation of the act.If you would like to tell her that she is breaking her own law, please write to Nanny at The No 10 Bunker.
Actually, I know at least one computer consultant with greatly reduced vision which has made the same observation, even for small bits of text, in the context of web pages of a site which he was evaluating for its accessibility.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that italic text (and cursive title font faces in general), when used with a screen magnifier, become much, much more difficult to read than normal text for him and other people with residual vision that don't necessarily depend on screen readers to use the computer.
At the time, I thought he was exagerating, but since then I have heard a couple of other people with reduced vision confirm the problem.
From how he described it though, I find it very difficult to belive that outdoor signage or printed materials would suffer the same drawbacks.
But it isn't necessarily completely unfounded.