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Earlier this month the World Wide Consortium (W3C) issued its invitation to Web developers hoping they would implement its Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines for designing browsers, multimedia players, and other Web software that will be more accessible to people with disabilities.
W3C is an international Internet standards body with over 500 member organisations and is run jointly by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in the US, the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control in France, and Keio University in Japan.
As part of the W3C's appeal to developers it has released the candidate recommendation for its User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 1.0.
UAAG 1.0 explains how keyboard navigation, control over multimedia rendering, configuration options, documentation and communication with specialised software such as speech synthesizers, screen magnifiers or other interface features benefit people with visual, hearing, physical, cognitive or neurological disabilities.
"Candidate Recommendation is a critical phase in the life of the UAAG 1.0," said Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and chair of the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (UAWG). "Our Working Group invites developers to comprehensively address software accessibility by implementing these guidelines."
The new UAAG 1.0 guidelines are now set to join two other W3C accessibility recommendations including one for designing accessible Web content and the other for authoring tools.
The Internet is particularly popular among blind people, said Tom Farrell, marketing manager with Dublin-based Internet and software usability company Frontend.com. However, he told ElectricNews.Net there are various features that would normally be included in a Web site that cannot be accessed by a person with a disability.
"A blind person uses a screen reader, which reads out the content on the screen," he explained. "However, the difficulties with a screen reader are that they can only be used if the screen content is in text format," he added. "Layout is also important," said Farrell. "If the content of a site is in column form, the screen reader will usually read across the columns."
He said UAAG 1.0 therefore set out specific guidelines for the ways in which accessibility to the Web can be improved for blind people and any others with special needs. According to Farrell the present initiative shows that there is an increasing awareness throughout society of the difficulties experienced by people with disabilities in accessing the Web.
The WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative), of which UAAG 1.0 is just one aspect, was created by W3C to develop protocols for the evolution and interoperability of the Internet.
WAI specifically addresses Web accessibility through five complementary activities which are, ensuring that Web technology supports accessibility, developing accessibility guidelines, coordinating tool development to facilitate evaluation and repair of Web sites, conducting education and research and coordinating Web development with research and development.
W3C is at http://www.w3.org.
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