There are numerous guidelines and requirements for creating accessible Web content that have been developed in the last 5 years. This foreword aims to place these within the context of the overall goal of ensuring that Web content is created accessible. With this view, the foreword will not detail specific access guidelines; instead, it focuses on establishing a framework within which these guidelines can be understood and extended to meet the needs of specific Web deployments.
The usability of Web content is determined by the design of the content, the capabilities of the client device used to access that content, the functionality available in the Web browser running on that client, and finally the special needs and abilities of the connecting user. Thus, it is often not meaningful to speak about the accessibility or lack of it in the abstract with respect to Web content alone; overall accessibility and usability is a function of all four of the factors enumerated above.
However, accessibility begins and ends with Web content; notice that given badly designed content, it is impossible to make that content accessible by modifying any of the other three relevant factors. As an example, consider a tourism site that provides information about a city exclusively in the form of bitmap images designed for a desktop computer. Such images are unusable on a mobile phone; they are also completely inaccessible to a blind user. Once this content has been created in this unsuitable format, it is very difficult if not impossible to deliver the content to either the mobile phone user or the blind user.
On the other hand, if the tourism Web site used a higher-level representation of the Web content, e.g., content stored in a document repository consisting of both text and images, it would be able to customize that content to suit the channel being used to deliver the content. With such rich content available, one can now envision building the necessary tools that enable both the mobile phone user as well as the blind user access the published information.
Notice that creating Web content that is accessible from a wide variety of user scenarios makes very good social, economic and business sense. It ensures that all citizens are treated equal; it ensures that businesses are able to reach the widest possible audience; and finally, it makes economic sense by ensuring long-term returns from the investment made in creating Web content. Failure to design Web content to meet present and future needs can be expensive indeed.
T.V. Raman: PhD (Cornell University)
IBM Research: Human Language Technologies
