SKERI's RERC: Web and Information Access for Blind and Visually Impaired Persons

Web and Information Access for Blind and Visually Impaired Persons

RERC Participation in Web Accessibility Initiative
Current Work to Expand Web and Information Accessibility
Project Publications and Web sites
Guides for Accessible Web site Production by William Loughborough
Universal Information Access: Our Current Project Web Sites
Selected Papers and Presentations
Web Access Initiative Publications to Which We Contributed

Project Personnel

RERC Participation in Web Accessibility Initiative
William Loughborough of the Smith-Kettlewell RERC has participated actively in efforts to make the World Wide Web accessible for persons with visual impairments. Our work has augmented that of other RERCs, notably the Trace Center RERC on Information Technology Access. In the late 1990's, with the advent of the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), small working groups (with representatives from industry and academia) were established to develop guidelines for web accessibility, web authoring tools, and other aspects of web technology. Mr. Loughborough has participated actively in several of these working groups but focused primarily on the group dealing with web authoring tool guidelines, which help ensure that all web page authoring programs (such as Microsoft Front Page, Word, Netscape Composer, etc.) which are used to generate web pages will automatically produce accessible output. By concentrating on this aspect of the project, we maximized the likelihood of assuring that future web pages will be accessible.

This work has also involved participation in panels at many conferences and meetings organized by the World Wide Web Consortium. For example, Mr. Loughborough organized and chaired one of the six panel sessions at the W3C conference in Amsterdam, May 2000, where he also participated in a workshop on distance learning technology. At a working conference in Austin, the needs for accessibility were emphasized to the authors of the new language standard for the web (HTML 4). Our particular focus at that meeting was Cascading Style Sheets, a method by which users can cause information on the Web to be presented in ways usable by people with disabilities.

A related activity has been participation in several E-mail lists on the Internet whose mission is to enhance the cyberworld's accessibility, including the interest groups of the WAI, the webwatch group who "police" web sites, the browser/screen-reader group, and other access-related sources for braille support. At the height of this effort, Mr. Loughborough participated in five weekly teleconferences of Web Accessibility Initiative Working Groups.

Current Work to Expand Web and Information Access
We continue with pro-active efforts to ensure that emerging web technologies will be as accessible as possible. Ongoing work encompasses the following priority areas:

1. Multiple Disabilities: A recent focus has been the development of accessibility initiatives for the increasing numbers of people with cognitive as well as visual disabilities, to try and ensure that future changes in the structure of the World Wide Web are as inclusive as possible.

2. Accessibility and Applications of new web-based languages and structures such as such as XML, Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Semantic Web. These developments offer the potential for making information access much more efficient for blind and partially sighted people, and we wish to ensure they are designed and implemented with all potential users in mind.

3.Device Independence: Ensuring accessibility is maintained as web and information access moves beyond the personal computer to an array of personal devices. It is difficult to envision what devices will be used by the 10 billion people who will eventually be connected on the Web -- they surely will not all have desktop computers -- so our emphasis is on system accessibility.

4. Universal Participation on the Web: Barriers such as expense, the need for computer access and skills, and other difficulties still prevent many blind, aged and multiply disabled people from full participation in the web in all its manifestations. We have begun a project to address these barriers and make it much simpler for all such people to have their own web site or presence on the information network.

5. "Ambient Information": The combination of the above technologies will eventually make possible on-demand information access wherever and whenever it is desired, for both blind and sighted people.