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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."

1 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Focusing on the wrong thing. by AltImage · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.