In one of the first legal cases to consider website accessibility, we helped improve access to Sydney Olympics events and online information.
When the 2000 Olympics were hosted in Sydney, Bruce Maguire was excited and planned to buy tickets for himself and his family. The Games were said to be the greatest sporting event in Australian history and an ‘Olympics for all Australians’. But Bruce was blind and discovered that the ticket booking process prevented him from participating.
Tickets could only be purchased using a form in a ticket book issued by the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG). This ticket book was complicated and required cross-referencing of tables to know when and where events were held.
Bruce asked SOCOG to provide a braille version of the ticket book, as he could not otherwise buy tickets. Initially, SOCOG indicated it would provide a braille version but later told Bruce the costs were too high and the audience too small to justify producing one.
Bruce then lodged a complaint with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (now the Australian Human Rights Commission), claiming SOCOG had directly discriminated against him, and indirectly discriminated against others with vision impairment.
Our role
The Justice and Equity Centre (as PIAC) represented Bruce in his complaint, with a team of barristers including Sarah Pritchard (later a judge of the Land and Environment Court).
Bruce alleged he was discriminated against by SOCOG’s failure to provide braille copies of the ticket book and souvenir programme, and by the inaccessibility of the Sydney Olympics website, which was not formatted for people using assistive technology.
At the hearing, SOCOG claimed providing a braille text would cause ‘unjustifiable hardship’ – it would cost too much time and money, outweighing the benefit to Bruce and others. The Commissioner rejected this argument, noting 200 braille copies would cost $17,500 a fraction of the overall $7.1m cost of printing and distributing the original ticket books.
The website issue became a separate complaint with its own hearing (Maguire v SOCOG 2000). SOCOG were uncooperative, refusing to provide adequate information to Tom Worthington and Jutta Treviranus, experts in inclusive web design engaged by Bruce and PIAC. SOCOG argued it would cost $2.2m and take 368 days to produce an accessible version of their website – which the Commissioner rejected, convinced by the evidence of Worthington and Treviranus that an accessible website would cost around $30,000 and take four weeks to build.
The outcome of the complaints
At both hearings, the Commissioner found SOCOG had unlawfully discriminated against Bruce and indirectly discriminated against others. SOCOG was instructed to provide Bruce with a braille booklet and assist him to make applications for remaining tickets. And SOCOG was ordered to make its website accessible by ensuring information was compatible with assistive technologies.
When SOCOG failed to fully comply with the order to make its website accessible, we represented Bruce in a third complaint. The Commissioner found SOCOG had only partially complied with the order and awarded Bruce $20,000 in damages, in recognition of the hurt and humiliation he suffered from the extended discrimination.
This was a significant, precedent-setting decision – one of the first complaints worldwide to consider website accessibility. Soon after the Commission’s decisions, the Australian Government required all agency websites to pass accessibility tests.
Further reading
Guardian, ‘Website ‘discriminated against blind’, 30 August 2000
Australian Financial Review, ‘Games alleged to be out of sight’, 11 December 1999
ZD Net, ‘SOCOG to front web hearing’, 8 October 2000
Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Bruce Maguire still fighting to make websites accessible to people with disabilities’, 7 November 2014
Australian Human Rights Commission video on Bruce’s complaint
