Web Accessibility
Web Accessibility means providing equal access and hence equal opportunity to the people with physical disabilities. Web, as it has evidently become an important resource in our activities makes it imperative that it remains accessible so that the users with disabilities can use it with same ease as people without disabilities. With governments enjoining new laws and guidelines to make the Web accessible, Web Accessibility is no more a discretion.
W3C’s WAI is one such effort to improve accessibility of the Web. WAI with the help of other interest groups formed guidelines and techniques to help different component of web accessibility. The major components of Web Accessibility are: Web Content (web page or web applications), Authoring (HTML Editors), Content interaction tools (user-agents, screen readers etc.) and Evaluation tools.
The guidelines recommended for these different components are as follows:
1. User Agent Accessibility Guidelines – Provides guidelines for the User Agent developers so that the user agents are accessible.
2. Authoring Tool Guidelines – Provides guidelines for the Authoring Tool Developers to build tools which generate accessible content. For example: ATAG 1.0 , ATAG 2.0
3. Web Content Guidelines – Provides guidelines and solutions for making the Web content more accessible and usable across devices. For example: WCAG1.0, WCAG2.0
4. EARL – provides a standard way for generating test results by the Accessibility evaluation tools.
The guidelines specified are basic, individual countries can have their custom accessibility standards. For example: 508, DDK etc.
Though these Guidelines, address various issues of Web Accessibility, they all essentially relate to technical specifications (HTML, CSS, SVG, and XML etc.) which are used to develop the Web content.
Vijaya Bhaskar Peddinti
vijayabhaskar_p01@infosys.com
Technical Specialist
Web 2.0 Research Lab - SETLabs
