When discussing the accessibility of the World Wide Web, it is important to break the problem down into the three basic components:
Making the WEB accessible or usable by people with disabilities
involves all three components. This document focuses on things that can
be done when creating HTML pages (source documents), but also
mentions strategies that might be used at other levels now or
in the future to provide context and a look forward. In some cases,
problems which are difficult to address today at the source document
level may be easily addressed with changes in the pipeline or
viewers.
Making HTML Documents Accessible TODAY
There are some features of the World Wide Web (WWW) which are
not currently accessible to people with some disabilities using
today's browsers (such as Mosaic, Netscape, Microsoft's
Internet Explorer, AOL net browser etc.). In addition, many of the data
formats currently do not support accessibility annotations (captions,
vocal and text annotations, etc.). As a result, if you want to
create WWW documents that will be accessible to people with disabilities
TODAY you need to either avoid using some features and data types
or provide alternate methods for carrying out the functions or
information provided through the inaccessible functions.
In the future, alternate access methods for the standard features may be built directly into WWW browsers, as well as the standard data storage and transmission formats, making it unnecessary to avoid features or build redundant mechanisms into your HTML documents. Until these alternate access features and standards are developed however, care must be taken in the design of HTML pages if they are to be accessible to users with disabilities.
Please send comments and suggestions to: web-team@trace.wisc.edu