Crippled By The Web
By Michael Floyd
Last month, I mentioned the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Having just returned from the Sixth International World Wide Web Conference, I simply stated "WAI is a good thing; just do it." As Lincoln Stein notes in this month's "Webmaster's Domain," the theme for that conference was "Everyone, Everything, Connected." To kick off the conference, the World Wide Web Consortium, better known as W3C, announced a new initiative that encourages Web-page developers to create pages that are accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. To accomplish this, the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) proposes to establish an International Program Office (IPO) responsible for conducting research and development, creating guidelines, developing protocols and technologies, and educating the industry. W3C will provide staff and funding for the IPO, which also carries the endorsement of the White House.
The IPO will focus initially on protocols and data formats aimed at making the Web itself more accessible. For example, W3C plans to develop descriptive video and captioning enhancements to HTML and the new eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Also in the works are plans to add extensions to cascading style sheets to support speech output, and the negotiation of user-agent features for HTTP and PEP.
The rest is up to developers of both Web tools and Web sites. For example, <alt> tag information is often used to describe or label images for users of character-based browsers.
