SKERI/RERC/Web Resource Center

The Smith-Kettlewell Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center W. Loughborough

This web site is a centralized resource dedicated to the goal of making the internet - especially the World Wide Web - increasingly accessible to persons with print disabilities.

The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute has supported this work for several years because it is evident that the future of employment for people with visual impairments will be heavily dependent on the ability to make use of this tool that is already reshaping commerce, education, and all forms of communication. The "level playing field" can only come about if we take steps to smooth it before the ruts are so deep that retrofitting it becomes too daunting.

Some blind individuals have made important contributions to the efforts leading to an accessible Web. Their sites contain a myriad of links to resources and techniques for making inclusion the norm of all things Web.

Gregory Rosmaita has links to hundreds of resources at his Camera Obscura site. If all I have done is lead you to this overwhelmingly eclectic site, the effort will have been worthwhile. He makes it simple to join any of the myriad groups discussing blindness related issues as well as linking to all the usual resources for visually impaired Web users.

Jamal Mazrui has a lot of interesting things to say as well as links to political and technological sites.

Kelly Ford hosts Webwatch which is a great way to keep up with the "War on Inaccessibility." The postings to his list are about sites found to be difficult for screen readers - and suggested solutions.

A word is worth a thousand pictures and a site's accessibility should be implicit - however logos are popular.

The dean of accessibility validation tools, Bobby, evaluates a site and gives tips on making it accessible.

Prior to the Spring of 1997 the efforts to provide information about and encouragement for the design of accessible Web documents was provided by many individuals and organizations dedicated to improving access to this vital medium.

Judy Dixon has written a comprehensive statement of the problem with proposals. It is directed at librarians and by implication to anyone attempting to improve web page accessibility.

Jim Lubin has a list of links to all kinds of pages (including most of those above) relating to "universal design" as applied to making web pages accessible.

The "Keepers of the Web" - the software engineers who invented and propose the recommendations for the procedures and languages used on the World Wide Web form the working part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). At the WWW7 conference in 1997 they announced the Web Access Initiative (WAI) which coupled with their newly proposed improvements in the most widely used language for web documents (HTML 4.0), and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) put them in the forefront of identifying the qualities needed for the Web to become increasingly accessible to people with disabilities. The effort has been joined by everybody listed here and their efforts promise to be far-reaching and, it is to be hoped, effective.