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Vol. 6, No. 1 Jan/Feb 1998

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Program to Make Web Friendlier

By Jeri Clausing, The New York Times

WASHINGTON—Because she uses a wheelchair, Judy Brewer says, her college research was often a series of exhausting trips and challenging acts of lifting heavy books from high shelves.

With the invention of the World Wide Web, she says, “I can go flying all over the world. I can do in one hour what used to take a week. The change is phenomenal when you have access to the Web.”

And so she hopes to bring that change to more disabled people in her new role as director of the World Wide Web Consortium's International Program Office for the Web Accessibility Initiative.

At a news conference on October 22, 1997 announcing creation of the program office, Brewer outlined plans for developing guidelines, ratings and education programs on Web barriers and alternatives for the 750 million people, or about 20 percent of the population, with disabilities.

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web and is director of the World Wide Web Consortium, also known as W3C, said: “The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone, regardless of disability, is an essential aspect. The IPO will ensure the Web can be accessed through different combinations of senses and physical capabilities, just as other (consortium) activities ensure its operation across different hardware and software platforms, media, cultures, and countries.”

The program is being sponsored by a partnership of government, industry, research, and disability organizations. The program was endorsed by the White House and has received $1 million from the National Science Foundation. Other financing is coming from the Department of Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, the European Commission's TIDE Programme, and consortium industry members, including IBM/Lotus Development, Microsoft, NCR and Riverland Holding.

“Through the IPO,” Brewer said, “we will be coordinating to ensure that needs related to accessibility are addressed through the consortium's work, and that the message of an accessible Web is carried as broadly as possible.”

The most obvious Web barriers are to the blind. Though Web browsing software exists for the blind, existing versions don't read many Web sites, Brewer said. But as technology changes and more audio, video, and complicated charts and flashing pictures and graphics are used in Web design, more barriers are being created to those with hearing, speech, and learning disabilities.

This is not only about ensuring that Web publishers offers a text-only alternative. “It's much broader than that,” Brewer said, noting that common and easy alternatives like captions of audio, descriptions of video, and options to multi-key commands need to be built into Web programs.

“The biggest barrier is going to be the awareness barrier—getting guidelines and the message out to the extent of people involved in the Web,” Brewer said. “The message we have to spread is that accessibility is vitally important. It's feasible and will in fact be easy.”

She added, “We have a lot of work, but I'm confident we have a program that will help us acknowledge greater Web access for everyone.”

The program will focus on five areas—data formats and protocols; guidelines for browsers, authoring tools, and content creation; rating and certification; education and outreach; and research and development.

Brewer said she intended to start spreading the message immediately and hoped that her office would have some initial written guidelines ready within a few months. The accessibility project has already reviewed the format and protocol elements to HTML 4.0, the upgrade to the Web's hypertext markup language, and will be offering feedback on ways to make things like images, audio and video more accessible to the disabled.

Brewer said that with legislative initiatives like the Americans with Disabilities Act, software and hardware manufacturers need to be aware of the need to make the Internet and computers more accessible in the workplace.

Tom Kalil, senior director of the White House National Economic Council, said that the administration strongly supported the project and was looking forward to the group's issuing guidelines that the federal government could use to make its own sites and equipment more accessible.

“When we have formal guidelines, the federal government will be in a much stronger position to require those in the procurement process,” he said.

Brewer has a background in applied linguistics, education, technical writing, management and disability advocacy.

She previously was project director for the Massachusetts Assistive Technology Partnership, a federally-financed project that promoted access to technology for people with disabilities. She serves on a number of advisory committees and boards, including the National Council on Disability's TechWatch Task Force, the Bell Atlantic Consumer Advisory Board, and the Board of Directors of the Adaptive Environments Center.

The World Wide Web Consortium was created in 1994 to develop common protocols that enhance the interoperability and promote the evolution of the World Wide Web. It is an industry consortium operated jointly by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in the United States, the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control in France, and Keio University in Japan.

Related Sites

Following are Web sites mentioned in this article.

World Wide Web Consortium's International Program Office for the Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI/

W3C http://www.w3.org

National Science Foundation http://www.nsf.gov/

Department of Education http://www.ed.gov/offices/OSERS/NIDRR/

TIDE Programme http://www.lu.se/intsek/EU/Ovriga_RTD-program/TIDE.html

MIT Laboratory for Computer Science http://www.lcs.mit.edu

French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control http://www.inria.fr/

Keio University http://www.keio.ac.ip/

This article was reprinted with permission from The New York Times.

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