Internet Service Providers' Association

ISPA Advisory 26: ICASA's Code on People with Disabilities

Release date: August 2009
Download as a PDF (152kb)
Note: The PDF download is the authoritative ISPA Advisory and may contain additional notes.

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Overview

The Code on People with Disabilities sets out compliance obligations for licensees when they are dealing with or providing services to disabled persons.

There is a basic, vague obligation on all ECNS and ECS licensees to ensure that their products and services are accessible to people with disabilities. Otherwise there are specific sections relating to public pay-phone operators, broadcasters and providers of community service telephones, which will not apply to most of ISPA's members. If you do provide these services then seek further advice on complying with specific obligations.

People with disabilities means "individuals who have a long term or recurring physical and/or mental impairment where a physical impairment includes a partial or total loss of bodily function or part of the body and mental impairment includes a clinically recognised condition or illness which affects a person's thought process, judgement and/or emotions".

Provision of information and reporting to ICASA

There are three obligations set out in the regulations with regard to providing information

• Licensees must provide operator assistance and other services at all call centres, which includes applying for a mobile telephone service, queries on the use of equipment, making account queries and a number of other services, in the customer's preferred official language.
  Comment: this can be disregarded and is obviously out of place and in conflict with other, more relevant regulations.
• Telephone bills, contracts with the customers, including publicly available terms and conditions, and information about the services provided to comply with the licence conditions should be made available to the visually impaired customers in appropriate formats, upon request
  Comment: if you are not able to provide this you should at least be able to refer the customer to a service provider who can. Also bear in mind that "voice" is an appropriate format for visually impaired customers and that oral agreements are binding, i.e. you can explain / read the terms and conditions etc and these can be verbally agreed to.
• Advertisements and promotions for products and services specifically designed for people with disabilities should be made available in accessible formats to relevant organisations of and for people with disabilities in every province and upon request.
  Comment: if you are targeting disabled persons for service provision then this is in your interests in any event.

Licensees must report on an annual basis on the progress of implementation of the above. No format for this report is provided.

Your compliance obligations

• if you provide any of the specific services listed above (broadcasting, community service telephones, public pay phones) please take advice on how to deal with these
• if you have visually-impaired subscribers be aware that you may be obliged to provide them with a bill in an appropriate format (and remember that voice is an appropriate format)
• if you target services and products at disabled persons as a market then you will need to advertise these with representative organisations in every province and provide copies of advertisements and promotions on request.
• at this stage we would advise that you only file the annual progress report if you have any dealings with disabled persons and are directly affected by the regulations.

Some concluding thoughts

In drafting this Advisory ISPA asked for the input of a leading South African expert on disabilities, who requested that two particular issues be raised:

Pro-active behaviour versus compliance
It would be good to see ISPA members consider ways and means of providing meaningful services that are specific to particular disabilities. Obvious examples are the provision of accounts and service information in accessible formats such as Braille and audio and use of sign language; and

Accessibility of websites
While in some parts of the world some progress has been made, we still have a long road ahead before achieving universal design of products, services, and environments. Where persons with disabilities are being served in significant numbers a facility to adjust print size should be available, icons should feature alt text, and tooltip text should be available. There are today a small number of individuals in South Africa able to provide technical advice in this area.