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The Internet

W3C Finalizes Disability Guidelines 22

Posted by timothy from the smoothing-the-way dept.
AltImage writes "Bringing a five-year project to a significant milestone, the World Wide Web Consortium finalized guidelines for building browsers and media players that work better for people with disabilities. Read the full story here."
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W3C Finalizes Disability Guidelines More

W3C Finalizes Disability Guidelines

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  • Guidelines will have other uses (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bbonnn ( 519410 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2002 @05:16PM (#4918619)
    "One of the things that has been both intriguing and promising from early on is that accessibility solutions didn't just help solve the problems they were created to solve," said Judy Brewer, director of the WAI. "We encourage the use of Web graphics. But someone accessing the Web through a PDA can't see a graphic, table or chart that well. For accessibility, you'd want someone to be able to visually scan it if they could, query it, run through it in a linear mode. Those flexibility user choices are precisely the things that people accessing the Web through alternate devices need as well."

    She brings up a very good point. Like the products that were initially developed for space flight but found their way into general consumer use (Velcro, etc.), general web accessibility has a number of other benefits besides making the web accessible to people with disabilities.

    This brings up a question which I'd like to see discussed either here, or in a new topic. I do not have a disability that prevents me from accessing the web via traditional means. However, I'm curious to ask people who use assistive devices: what is your experience going online like? How much content can you access? How do you feel about it? I know these questions have been generally answered by the document, but I'm curious about personal stories.
    • Very true. Getting more web designers to follow these guidelines is good for EVERYONE, not just those with disabilities. If disabled people are able to view the page the way they *need* to, then everyone else is also able to view it the way they *want* to. The more the web is held up to the ideals of flexibility and customizability the better.

      I personally almost always send a note to the owners of web pages that don't follow these guidelines - I don't think it often has much impact, but if more people did it, maybe it would. In any case, people making these bad web pages deserver to be bothered by people complaining about them! Whether it's because you need to be able to access it through a screen-reader, or you can't handle a mouse, or you just hate annoying javascript, guidelines like this can help you set up your browser to display the information and manipulate it in the way you choose, which is a good thing.
    • This brings up a question which I'd like to see discussed either here, or in a new topic. I do not have a disability that prevents me from accessing the web via traditional means. However, I'm curious to ask people who use assistive devices: what is your experience going online like? How much content can you access? How do you feel about it? I know these questions have been generally answered by the document, but I'm curious about personal stories.

      Well they're probably not going to answer 'cause slashdot isn't exactly the most accessible site! Try reading /. in Lynx [browser.org] for example, and you'll see how difficult it as. Now imagine a screen reader reading all of that, without the option of skipping it, it's going to get cumbersome very quickly.

      I think a good start to understanding accessibility would be Mark Pilgrim's site [diveintomark.org] - more specifically his Dive Into Accessibility site [diveintoac...bility.org]. While this concentrates more on weblogs (hence the "30 days to a more accessible weblog" slogan), it's still very useful.

      Mark focusses on accessibility by using fictional (but perfectly plausable) character sketches of five people: Jackie [diveintoac...bility.org], Michael [diveintoac...bility.org], Bill [diveintoac...bility.org], Lillian [diveintoac...bility.org], and Marcus [diveintoac...bility.org].

      Quoting the site:
      These people have several things in common:

      1. They all have a combination of physical, mental, and technological disabilities which make it more difficult to use the Internet.
      2. Although fictitious, they all represent real people with disabilities, and they use the Internet in ways that real people with disabilities use the Internet.
      3. They all have difficulty reading your web site.


      By using these characters he encourages you to put yourself in their shoes, and therefore be more considerate.

      If you design pages for a living, or even if you've just got a personal blog I'd highly recommend that you read Dive Into Accessibility [diveintoac...bility.org], you'll be a more accessible person because of it.

      Cheers,

    • If Velcro had been part of the space program, how come it was developed in the 1940s by a Swiss inventor [velcro.com] walking his dog?
      • Probably because he is confusing it with Teflon, which was developed in the 1940s by the US nuclear weapons program.

        Even those products that _were_ developed as part of the space program would have been developed anyway, at an appropriate time. The notion of net benefits to society from government program "spinoff" is nonsense.

  • Focusing on the wrong thing. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AltImage ( 626465 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2002 @11:12PM (#4920738) Homepage
    I strongly believe that the path to better accessability lies in the creation of better screen reader technology. There is absolutely no way that the billions of pages online are going to be retouched to make them accessable. The battle has, to a large degree, already been lost. Don't get me wrong...I'm all in favor of producing compliant pages, but I wonder what percentage of the Internet is compliant today? We're never going to clean up the mess. There are too many mediocre and amateure web developers out there who don't even know what the W3C is. Forget converting the developers and instead focus on efforts to create the uber-screenreader. Something capabale of navigating through the web applications we're using today. I do lots of work for hotels and with their reservation systems in particular. Do you have any idea how hard it is to book a hotel room with a screen reader? or a plane ticket, or anything. It's a joke.

    This is the perfect area for open source software. I also think that this would be the perfect place for the goverment to get involved. Not in legislation but in funding. The government seems very interested in passing laws to ensure equal access but isn't it about time they write a check to make equal access on the Internet a reality. One perfect piece of software will solve this entire problem for everybody.

    • Re:Focusing on the wrong thing. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by JohanV ( 536228 ) on Thursday December 19, 2002 @07:40AM (#4921972) Homepage
      Like screen readers are the solution to all problems. How are better screenreaders going to help deaf people? How are screen readers going to help people with a physical dysability that prevents them from using a mouse? How are screen readers going to help those with ADHD? How usefull is a screenreader if the navigation is on the bottom of 200 lines of text?

      Accessibility is not about reading webpages aloud to the blind.

  • UAAG and HTTP_ACCEPT (Score:2, Interesting)

    by AShocka ( 97272 )

    Hopefully this initiative will drive the production of better browsers (user agents) and web development that will facilitate services to users.

    User agents are improving on the implementation of the HTTP_ACCEPT header for determining MIME types the user agent will accept. This great potential was missed with Netscape Navigator 2 because, in the rush to get it to market, they just defaulted to using *.* (this browser accepts everything), when it didn't. If this was implemented correctly it would allow the developer to deliver media according to the user agents capacity.

    Also see User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 [w3.org] and the UAAG discussion list [w3.org].

  • Other Web Accessibility Initiatives (Score:3, Informative)

    by AShocka ( 97272 ) <reverse.gek@gmail.com> on Friday December 20, 2002 @06:26AM (#4928725)
    The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 [w3.org] (WCAG) are in draft form and are trying to improve on WCAG 1.0. If you really what to contribute to them, or can contribute in anyway through writing parsers, etc, go ahead and join the WCAG GL [w3.org]

    Also of interest in the same area are;

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