Maguire v SOCOG 2000 was a legal case in Australia about making a website accessible to a visually impaired person.
On 7 June 1999, Maguire made a complaint to the human rights and equal opportunity commission (HREOC), alleging that the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) had discriminated against him as a person disabled, in contravention of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992[1] in three aspects: the failure to provide braille copies of the information required to order Olympic Games tickets; the failure to provide braille copies of the Olympic Games souvenir programme; and the failure to provide a website which was accessible to Maguire.
[2][3] After the completion of the ticket book case (Maguire v SOCOG 1999 ) on 30 September 1999, conciliation on the remaining matters was attempted but by 29 November 1999, the talks failed.
[3] On that day 27 March, SOCOG in a direction conference agreed to provide the Souvenir programme to Maguire in braille.
[3] From 27 March 2000 to 4 August 2000, several direction conferences and letters from Maguire's solicitor to SOCOG solicitor asking SOCOG to provide information in order for Mr Worthington and Ms Treviranus who were experts in computers and adaptive technology to complete their assessment did not result in the experts receiving the complete amount of information.
[3][8] SOCOG said that it did not discriminate unlawfully against Maguire but if it did, that the cost and effort in retraining staff and redrawing entire development methods was an unjustifiable hardship in providing an accessible website.
[3] However, Maguire with expert witnesses argued that the number of templates is significantly less than 1,295 and the reformatting of the templates will require considerably less than the two hours for each alleged by SOCOG; a more realistic estimate for the minor changes required is ten minutes each; nor is there the need for unique manually generated formats; no new infrastructure will be required because it is allegedly extant; a team of one experienced developer with a group of 5-10 assistants could provide an accessible site to Level A compliance in four weeks; wrapping in each cell can be met by using a simple device namely the inclusion of an invisible end of cell character which would indicate to a blind person the end of the text in each cell; the cost of making the site accessible is a modest amount; the number of templates has been estimated at 357 for 28 sports.
[12][13] Peter Coroneos from the Internet Industry Association warned businesses that the SOCOG decision confirmed that the DDA applied to online services and that Australian websites targeting overseas customers may be liable under equivalent legislation.