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Web Consortium Announces Accessibility Guidelines
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recently announced the release of the "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" specification. As a W3C Recommendation, the specification is stable, contributes to the universality of the Web, and has been reviewed by the W3C Membership who recommend it as the means for making Web sites accessible. The W3C encourages information providers to raise their level of accessibility using this Recommendation. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines establish stable principles for accessible design, such as the need to provide equivalent alternatives for auditory and visual information. Each guideline has associated checkpoints explaining how these principles apply to specific features of sites. For example, providing alternative text for images ensures that information is available to a person who cannot see images. The guidelines are designed to be forward-compatible with evolving Web technologies, yet enable sites to degrade gracefully when confronted with legacy browsers. Specifics on how to implement the checkpoints with the latest versions of mark-up or presentation languages such as HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), or SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) are described in a parallel "Techniques" document, to be updated periodically. As with other areas of the W3C Web Accessibility Inititive, these guidelines are an outcome of a collaboration of industry, disability organizations, accessibility research centers and governments working together to identify consensus solutions for barriers that people with disabilities encounter on the Web. "The W3C has provided a unique forum which has allowed us to bring together experts from industry, research and practice in a way that has not been possible before," explained Gregg Vanderheiden, Director of Trace Research & Development Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Co-Chair of the Web Content Guidelines Working Group. "The result is a set of guidelines that is more comprehensive, technically sound and practical than anything possible before. In addition, because the guidelines are built on the work and participation of virtually everyone who is active in this area, it provides us for the first time with a definitive set of guidelines that can serve as a reference for the field." For more information on the W3C, contact Janet Daly at janet@w3.org or 617-253-5884, or visit the W3C Web site at http://www.w3.org. |
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