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Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)RegionGlobal Programme SummaryThe Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) works with organisations around the world to develop strategies, guidelines, and resources to help make the world wide web accessible to people with disabilities. WAI develops guidelines (on the basis of international standards for web accessibility), support materials to help understand and implement web accessibility and resources. (Editor's note: Per WAI, web accessibility involves taking steps such as providing equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content, refraining on relying on colour alone, ensuring that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully (and that documents are clear and simple), and providing context and orientation information (as well as clear navigation mechanisms). Communication StrategiesThe key strategy shaping WAI is international collaboration: WAI welcomes participation from people around the world. WAI, in collaboration with organisations around the world, pursues accessibility of the web through 5 primary activities:
Volunteers review, implement, and promote guidelines. They also collaborate in working groups to discuss issues such as guidelines and techniques for accessibility, and methods for managing and evaluating this attempt to equalise access to information and communication technology (ICT). For instance, the process of crafting web accessibility guidelines, technical reports, and educational resources to help make the web accessible to people with disabilities involves efforts to ensure broad community input and encourage what the organisation terms "consensus development" ("Consensus is a core value of W3C. To promote consensus, the W3C process requires Chairs to ensure that groups consider all legitimate views and objections, and endeavor to resolve them, whether these views and objections are expressed by the active participants of the group or by others (e.g., another W3C group, a group in another organization, or the general public). Decisions MAY be made during meetings (face-to-face or distributed) as well as through email.") Through this process, WAI developed the following W3C Recommendations: "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: WCAG Overview, WCAG 1.0" (May 1999), "Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines: ATAG Overview, ATAG 1.0" (February 2000), and "User Agent Accessibility Guidelines: UAAG Overview, UAAG 1.0" (December 2002). Details about the milestones that a technical report goes through on its way to becoming a W3C Recommendation may be found by clicking here (e.g., "Working Drafts are published and announced specifically to ask for review and input from the community....WAI actively encourages broad participation from industry, disability organizations, accessibility researchers, government, and others interested in Web accessibility...") A visit to the WAI website enables access to resources such as "Essential Components of Web Accessibility", 10 quick tips for those seeking to create accessible websites, and links to additional resources such as an WAI online overview and a web content accessibility and mobile web. One page on this website is a multi-page resource suite that outlines different approaches for evaluating Websites for accessibility. Development IssuesTechnology. Key PointsOrganisers contend that "[t]he power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." Continuing, WAI explains that, "[f]or those unfamiliar with accessibility issues pertaining to Web page design, consider that many users may be operating in contexts very different from your own:
...While there are several situations to consider, each accessible design choice generally benefits several disability groups at once and the Web community as a whole. For example, by using style sheets to control font styles and eliminating the FONT element, HTML authors will have more control over their pages, make those pages more accessible to people with low vision, and by sharing the style sheets, will often shorten page download times for all users." ContactJudy Brewer
WAI Domain Leader
SourcePlaced on the Communication Initiative site May 28 2008 Last Updated May 28 2008 |
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