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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. Guidelines will have other uses by bbonnn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.