Website accessibility and the European Union: citizenship,procurement and the proposed Accessibility Act

Websites can be accessible to all if they are designed according to certain principles. Website accessibility has long been a European Union policy priority, particularly with the growth of egovernment services and the related impact on citizenship. A number of studies, while showing some improvement in accessibility, indicate the need for accessibility improvement in relation to egovernment services. This article outlines the European Union's policies on accessible websites and the related legislation. A theme in the development of disability related Directives is fragmentation and the lack of harmonising principles. Public procurement has been used as an extremely effective tool to increase accessibility in the United States, and it is this approach that lies at the heart of the proposed Accessibility Act. This initiative seeks to harmonise standards and policies on accessibility to harness fully the power of the internal market and the commercial impetus in order to increase access. While the Accessibility Act is currently being drafted after recent public consultation, this article evaluates the potential impact it could have on the accessibility of European Union public, and ultimately, private websites.     

Democratic Governance,Self-Fulfillment and Disability: Web Accessibility Under the Americans With Disabilities Act and the First Amendment

The Americans with Disabilities Act celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2015. Enacted by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush, the ADA was designed to ensure that people with disabilities are given “independence, freedom of choice, control of their lives, the opportunity to blend fully and equally into the rich mosaic of the American mainstream.” The ADA defines the kinds of public and private spaces that must provide access and accommodations to the disabled. Missing from that list, because of the ADA's timing, is the Internet, effectively shutting the disabled out of the rich marketplace of ideas online. This article examines both the case law surrounding this omission and delays by the executive and legislative branches in extending the ADA to the Internet. It argues that making the Internet a “place of public accommodation” under the ADA is supported by First Amendment principles of democratic governance and self-fulfillment.     

Changing regulation and the future of the professional partnership: the case of the Legal Services Act, 2007 in England and Wales

The UK Legal Services Act 2007 permits external financing and unlimited non-lawyer ownership of legal practices through the formation of Alternative Business Structures (ABSs). For many, the impact of this changed regulation on the ‘professional partnership’, as the dominant organisational form through which legal services are delivered, will be considerable. However, to date few studies have explored this empirically. This paper addresses this gap by examining organisational changes within ABSs to assess how far these firms have departed from the professional partnership model. Focusing upon the ABS population licensed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority between January 2012 and August 2015, the study findings show a continuum of organisational responses against four specified indicators: incorporation; multi-disciplinary practices; non-lawyer ownership; and external investment. These range from those that depart little from traditional practices to those that are more radical. We conclude that, whilst regulatory reform has yet to dislodge the dominance of the professional partnership, it has disturbed the status quo and increased the variety of ‘economic units’ within which legal services are delivered.     

Meta-analyses in research in forensic medicine: Alcohol, drugs, diseases and traffic safety

The meta-analytic approach is one of the most informative methods to structure and combine findings of different studies. Hence, even in forensic sciences meta-analyses were used to arrange knowledge. At most this technique was applied to summarize results of experimental and epidemiological studies on alcohol, illegal drugs, medicines, diseases and driving or skills related to driving. The article demonstrates the method used and the results obtained.     

Availability and Accessibility of the Nation's Research Infrastructure: The Transfer of Assistive Technologies by Federal Laboratories

The Federal Laboratories have almost 30 years of history in technology transfer. This paper examines some critical factors leading and impeding success, in terms of strategic partnerships, mission relevance and transfer context. The paper also considers future potential for transfers to the field of assistive technology for people with disabilities.     

Legislating Dangerously: Bad Samaritans,Good Society,and the Heroism Act 2015

The Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Act 2015 is a troublesome statute. The Act requires that, when considering a claim brought against a defendant in negligence or for breach of statutory duty, the court must assess whether that party was ‘acting for the benefit of society or any of its members’ (section 2), or ‘demonstrated a predominantly responsible approach towards protecting the safety or interests of others’ (section 3), or was ‘acting heroically’ (section 4). However laudable the Coalition Government's attempts to foster a ‘Big Society’ might have been, this enactment was not the proper vehicle to achieve it. Some provisions merely repeat longstanding common law principles. Others may have been intended to amend the common law to encourage ‘good citizenship’, but fall well short of that aim. And some aspects of the Act's drafting have the (perhaps unintended) potential to sit uncomfortably with established common law negligence principles.     

高校科技成果转化中与权属有关的问题研究

一、科技成果中的知识产权众所周知,科技成果是人们进行科学技术研究等智力创造性活动的产品。随着现代经济与科技的迅猛发展,科技成果以及知识资产在生产投入中的作用也越发无可替代。科技成果之所以不同于有形资产,是因为它往往在其从无到有的产生过程中,涉及到充分应用以及转化为生产力等问题。因此,对于知识产权的界定,实际上是要在个人、集体与社会利益之间寻找一个平衡点,以便使其更有效地发挥产权的激励作用。于是,作为一种较为特殊的资源,产权界定的方法和结果直接影响到所产生的社会收益的大小。二、科技成果产出及转化阶段的产权…     

美国《众筹法案》中集资门户法律制度的构建及其启示

为促进股权众筹产业的发展,美国《众筹法案》创立了集资门户这一全新的众筹平台类型。相较于注册券商,集资门户的设立门槛较低,但其业务范围受到严格限制,只能从事基础性的信息和交易中介业务,禁止以任何方式参与或影响投融资双方的证券交易。我国股权众筹法律规范应借鉴集资门户这一制度设计,在平衡兼顾各方主体利益的基础上,对众筹平台的经营行为进行规范化管理,尽快结束目前我国众筹网站的无序经营状态。     

South Africa's unintended experiment in school choice: how the National Education Policy Act,the South Africa Schools Act and the Employment of Educators Act create the enabling conditions for quasi-markets in schools

School choice is often identified with right-leaning, voucher-happy, market-oriented public school systems like those found in the United States. Thus, the proposition that a social democratic state such as South Africa will offer many primary and secondary school learners far greater choice strikes many as counter-intuitive and implausible. The authors demonstrate that the three major pieces of education framework legislation—National Education Policy Act (NEPA), South Africa Schools Act (SASA) and Employment of Educators Act (EEA)—conspire with recent historical events and deep political and constitutional commitments to create South Africa's unintended experiment in school choice.

The authors emphasize that the legal framework created by legislation and regulation are necessary but not sufficient conditions—they prefer to call them enabling conditions—for the creation of quasi-markets in schools. The generation of quasi-markets in schools depends on several other factors required for all markets. The absence of many of these features in much of South Africa explains why the majority of South African learners do not have access to quasi-markets in schools. The absence of such features is largely a function of apartheid's legacy of deeply entrenched patterns of inequality in primary and secondary schooling.

Having demonstrated that historical, political, legal and economic conditions had the unintended consequence of producing school choice—and that school choice was not the result of the state's adoption of a conscious and deliberate policy—the authors examine the state's response to this de facto policy. The authors remain agnostic as to the desirability of the de facto policy and conclude with an exploration of some of the primary critiques of choice in South Africa. While they dismiss the ‘political’ critiques as largely facile, the available empirical evidence suggests the limited systemic benefits and the potentially deleterious consequences for the poorest of the poor who reside in areas where quasi-markets exist. The state's current ‘conscious’ attempts to re-engineer a modest mixed model, that emphasizes access to existing quasi-markets—and thus exploits superior existing school stock for the benefit of learners from historically disadvantaged communities—and that shifts public resources to those schools in the greatest need, accords with what little we know about the advantages and disadvantages of choice.     

Demands on scientific studies in different fields of forensic medicine and forensic sciences. Traffic medicine--impaired driver: alcohol, drugs, diseases

Since human performance is a key factor in crash causation detailed knowledge of the involvement of alcohol, drugs and diseases is of fundamental interest for road safety. To better understand the effect of these influencing factors it is important to use a combination of witness observations and a range of experimental and epidemiological studies. Epidemiological approaches to research such as road-side-surveys, case-control-studies, culpability analysis, pharmaco-epidemiological studies are usually seen as being able to provide the best answers. This article discusses the relative merits of experimental and epidemiological approaches.