Dear Aeby
Shawn Lawton Henry, SLHenry@optavia.com, Optavia Corporation
Wendy Chisholm, wendy@w3.org, W3C
Introducing Dear Aeby
In this regular column, Wendy Chisholm and Shawn Henry offer web accessibility tips and tricks to help designers increase the accessibility of their web pages. The focus is on making the Web accessible for people with disabilities. At the same time, the benefits of web accessibility extend beyond disability. Many web accessibility strategies increase access and usability for all people in different situations, such as using mobile devices in a hands-free environment. Web accessibility strategies also provide solutions to some internationalization issues.
Wendy Chisholm is a Human Factors Engineer at the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) focusing on the development of tools and techniques to make the Web usable and accessible. She is a co-editor of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.
Shawn Lawton Henry is Director of R&D at Optavia Corporation, a usability research and consulting firm for e-commerce. She contributes to a number of accessibility and standards activities with the Trace Center, HFES/HCI 200 for ANSI, and ISO.
This column will answer questions about web accessibility guidelines and perhaps tread new ground in how to make the Web accessible. If you have a question or an idea to share, send it to Aeby (AccEssiBilitY) at SLHenry@optavia.com, with the subject "Dear Aeby".
W3C WAI
We recommend W3C WAI as your first stop for web accessibility information. W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), in partnership with organizations around the world, is pursuing accessibility of the Web through five complementary activities:
- ensuring that the core technologies of the Web support accessibility
- developing guidelines for web content, user agents, and authoring tools
- developing evaluation and repair tools for accessibility
- conducting education and outreach
- tracking research and development that can affect the future accessibility of the Web
Guidelines
In May 1999, the W3C published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 as a Recommendation. This document aims to help content developers, including page authors and site designers, create accessible Web sites. If you are unfamiliar with the guidelines, start out by skimming the Fact Sheet for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which answers basic questions about the guidelines.
It is helpful to note that the guidelines are intended to be browser- and technology-independent. A companion document, Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, explains how to implement the checkpoints and provides examples for various methods.
As an example, the first guideline states, "Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content." The explanation describes the issue of providing text equivalents for non-text content, including images, pre-recorded audio, and video. It explains that text equivalents can be rendered in ways that are accessible to people with various disabilities using a variety of technologies. Under this guideline, five checkpoints include: "Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element" and "Provide redundant text links for each active region of a server-side image map." In the techniques document, examples are given showing how to use "alt" and "longdesc" attributes for IMG elements as well as how to use the OBJECT element.
Opportunity
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines working group is in the process of closing out their original charter and designing future directions in a new charter. If you are interested in participating, now is the time to join! They are especially looking for people to help test and develop techniques. If you are interested send mail to Wendy at wendy@w3.org.
News
Slashdot recently interviewed Curtis Chung, Director of Technology for the National Federation of the Blind. Chung discusses the reasons for the AOL lawsuit and how to make web pages more accessible for blind users, and generally talks about life as a blind programmer. This interview is available at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/12/09/1342224&mode=thread.
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Last update: December 21, 1999
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