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W3C calls for easier Web accessibility
Tuesday, September 18 2001
by Kevin O' Brady


The World Wide Web Consortium has invited developers to implement its new Web
Accessibility Initiative to improve Web access for people with disabilities.

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.