The Athens 2004 Olympic organising committee (ATHOC) unveiled their new web site as evidence of a commitment to online disabled access.

"This is a site for such a global event that to exclude people with disabilities would be a crime," said a senior ATHOC official.

Sydney sued

The issue of Web accessibility was highlighted to the Olympic movement in August 2000 when a successful law suit was brought against the organisers of the Sydney Games over disabled access to their site.

"We feel we've made significant improvements and are committed to fulfilling Worldwide Web Consortium guidelines on accessibility," said the official.

Founded by the man credited as the inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) sets international standards in Internet usability.

Alternative text

Blind or partially-sighted people can make full use of web sites with the assistance of brail screens and enhanced browsers, but only if they have been designed taking into account global standards.

"We have aimed at cross-browser, cross-platform access, cleaned up the layout and provided text captions for all images," said the Athoc official.

By providing an alternative text label for all visual elements of the sites, specialised browsers can reconstruct the look and feel in a text form, giving a fuller experience to disabled users.

W3C target

The new site still falls short of the maximum AAA rating awarded by the W3C and Athoc admit they won't be able to reach the standard until April.

"You can make a beautiful site without resorting to gimmicks," said the official.