E-Access Bulletin Live

Voluntary guidelines on web accessibility are all very well, but there is nothing like a law for ensuring everyone falls into line. Such was the message to emerge from last month’s European Commission conference on digital inclusion held in Vienna.

Alexander Fase, Web Guidelines Project Manager at the Dutch government ICT agency ICTU, told delegates that his organisation had developed a non-technical, ‘quality’ approach to accessibility standards which focused on ensuring all information could be accessed through any channel, now and in the future.
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The long-anticipated publication of new international web accessibility standard WCAG 2.0 has coincided with the release of a draft British Standard for managing web accessibility, in a landmark month for internet inclusion.

WCAG 2.0 (www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20) is the new version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), accepted as the main benchmark for ensuring web content is usable by people with disabilities

The new ‘recommendation’ – the consortium’s term for a full standard – was finally released on 11 December 2008, nine years and seven months after the adoption of its predecessor WCAG 1.0. The delay was caused by the W3C’s desire to consult as widely as possible on every stage of the complex guidelines’ development; and to ensure the standard is as generic and flexible as possible so it will remain relevant as web technologies develop.
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An online resource of open source, royalty-free assistive technology tools, accessible and usable at any time and across the world, is to be launched next year by a consortium of more than 30 US and European IT and disability organisations and leaders, the European Commission e-Inclusion conference heard this month.

Addressing the Vienna conference Dr Gregg Vanderheiden, director of the Trace Research and Development Centre at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (trace.wisc.edu), said the rationale for the project was to ensure that the societies of the future did not create a global disconnected underclass.
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The inaccessibility of job advertising websites to people with disabilities is an “emerging scandal” which could expose companies to legal challenge, according to the head of one of the world’s leading bodies promoting equal opportunities in the workplace.

Susan Scott-Parker, founder and chief executive of the Employers’ Forum on Disability (www.efd.org.uk), said this month that inaccessible recruitment sites pose a “huge problem” to jobseekers with disabilities, particularly since many employers were now recruiting exclusively online.
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Many government, politics and news websites present significant barriers to  web users with disabilities using special access technologies such as text to speech convertors, delegates heard at last week’s E-Democracy ’08 conference hosted by Headstar (www.headstar-events.com/edemocracy08).

Robin Christopherson, head of accessibility at technology access charity AbilityNet, presented a live audio demonstration of many of the difficulties that blind web users experience.

Among the sites he examined was the recently revamped Number 10 Downing Street website, which while relatively accessible in many ways, still has various untagged links which read simply ‘click here’, offering the audio browser no clue as to what lies behind. The website also features auto-start videos, with unlabelled control buttons, so that blind users are confronted with video noise drowning out their own audio controls and cannot work out how to turn it off.
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With the long-awaited appearance of version 2 of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) now expected in December, the spotlight is set to fall once more on the workings of this key international standards body.

The consortium, known as W3C, was founded in 1994 by the inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee, who remains its director. It functions as a developer and repository of key technical standards and protocols that are needed to be shared by technology companies and users to ensure that the web remains open and universal.

With a current membership of more than 400 organisations, from large multinational technology companies to universities and charities, W3C has three main global bases: the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) at the Sophia Antipolis technology park in the South of France; Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Technology Laboratory; and Keio University in Japan.

The consortium has a core staff of around 70, with around 30 in Europe, 30 in the US and 10 Japan. But the actual headcount of those involved in its work is more than 500 if a tally is taken of everyone in the consortium’s working groups, interest groups, and the wider community.
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by Majeed Saleh.

The Olympic Games are currently being followed avidly by sports fans, journalists and politicians worldwide, many of them using the official Beijing 2008 website (en.beijing2008.cn), the most comprehensive source of information on events.

Given the huge global interest the Olympics always stimulates, the demands and expectations on the Games website are high, and designing a site to please everyone is always going to be tough. Where accessibility for people with disabilities is concerned, however, previous organisers have not always got it right.
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Two new draft documents relating to accessibility and the future of the web have been published in the past month the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C – www.w3.org).

The first, ‘Shared web experiences: barriers common to mobile device users and people with disabilities’, notes that many of the barriers faced by internet browsers on mobile devices are the same as those experienced by people with disabilities. The document provides examples of the barriers of access to web content for both sets of users (www.w3.org/WAI/mobile/experiences). (more…)

The new guidelines for UK public sector bodies on ‘Delivering inclusive websites’ (see E-Access Bulletin, June 2008) are a bewildering blend of the vague with the Draconian.

The guidance, published by the Central Office of Information (COI) under the reference number ‘TG102′ (See www.coi.gov.uk/guidance.php?page=129),stipulates that all new UK public sector websites must conform to at least ‘AA’ accessibility standards as specified by the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Existing central government department websites must conform to ‘AA’ by December 2009. “This includes websites due to converge on Directgov or BusinessLink, unless convergence is scheduled before this date,” the guidelines state. Sites of all other government agencies and non-departmental bodies must conform by March 2011.
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Joe Clark, the Canadian web accessibility expert, has said that he believes we now live in a post-guideline era.

What might Joe mean by this?

To date, talk about making websites usable by disabled people has usually featured the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Web Accessibility Guidelines as a key aspect. This is absolutely appropriate and remains the crucial foundation of every website.
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