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W3C Finalizes Disability Guidelines

Posted by timothy on 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."

4 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Re:pfft.. by Fweeky · · Score: 4, Informative

    Microsoft is part of the W3C, and help make many of these standards. If you look at the acknowledgments you'll see Microsoft is actually a member of the working group responsible for these guidelines.

  2. Re:Guidelines will have other uses by ManxStef · · Score: 2, Informative
    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 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 - more specifically his Dive Into Accessibility site. 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, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus.

    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, you'll be a more accessible person because of it.

    Cheers,

  3. Other Web Accessibility Initiatives by AShocka · · Score: 3, Informative
    The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (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

    Also of interest in the same area are;

  4. UAAG Compliance and Test Suites by AShocka · · Score: 2, Informative