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7 - Causing Digital Disablement Is Not a Trigger for Regulation by Anti-Discrimination Laws: Ignoring Capacity in Favour of Prescribed Relationships

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2017

Paul Harpur
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
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Summary

This chapter argues that anti-discrimination laws are failing to regulate situations that impact on the digital disablement of persons with print impairments. In order to promote digital equality regulatory interventions must target those parties who have the capacity to significantly influence levels of digital disablement in the community. As anti-discrimination laws are one of the primary vehicles to promote an inclusive society, it is critical for these laws to impose duties on parties who have the capacity to impact on digital disablement. Anti-discrimination laws do not create general obligations to reduce discrimination in society. Instead, anti-discrimination laws identify a range of relationships as triggers for intervention, and require parties in those relationships to reduce, subject to a range of technical exceptions, discrimination based on a person’s disability. The trigger for attracting obligations not to discriminate is actual or potential contact with persons with a protected attribute; in this case a person with a disability. If a person is not in a relationship regulated by anti-discrimination laws, then that person has no duty arising from anti-discrimination laws to avoid, or even consider, when asking how their actions may have a discriminatory impact.
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Chapter
Information
Discrimination, Copyright and Equality
Opening the e-Book for the Print-Disabled
, pp. 179 - 203
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2017

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