From PAS 78 to a full British Standard
British Standards Institution (BSi), the UK’s national standards body, now in the process of establishing a new technical standards committee to oversee the development of a standard which all organisations will be able to follow in procuring or developing an accessible website.
[…]
[Julie] Howell says BSi would like the standard to be based on PAS78 but she is also keen to widen it to embrace some of the new types of web service that were not around just a couple of years ago when the PAS was drawn up.
Read the full story on the E-Access Blog: Raising the standards.
Typical Government Response? Yup.
A recent government epetition read:
“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ensure that any website launched by the government complies with accessibility standards (WCAG AA at least).”
The response?
“The Government is committed to ensuring that all government websites are accessible and easy to use for people with disabilities.
Action 7 of the Prime Minister’s Digital Strategy is to ‘improve accessibility to technology for the digitally excluded and ease of use for the disabled’.
This strategy is to be implemented by DTI with support from OGC and eGU (now the Cabinet Office Delivery and Transformation Group). A cross-government review of the Digital Strategy is currently under way under the supervision of the DTI).”
Firstly, how is this responding to the petition? And given that this petition came about because of the perceived failure of the DTI to get its house in order with regards web accessibility, what do we think about their ability to implement and supervise this?
Or have a totally mis-read this reply. Please tell me I have!
Petition the UK Government For Better Web Accessibility
You may recall that some months ago Bruce Lawson and Dan Champion brought to our attention the poor state of affairs with a recent web site update for the Department of Trade and Industry - as in, it had poor accessibility despite it being a key requirement in the tendering process. It’s still not resolved (although various letters have gone back and forth from Bruce/Dan and government types suggesting that it is being looked at/addressed) but perhaps you can do your bit to ensure that UK taxpayers’ money is not wasted again in the future on sites that fail to meet the accessibility levels that you should rightly expect them to pass.
Go on, it won’t take you a moment and you’ll be saving Bruce and Dan a lot of bother in the future 
Note: you must be a British citizen or resident to sign the petition.
