WAI Will Alter The Way Everyone Views The Web
CAMBRIDGE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, U.S.A., 1998 AUG 11 (NB) -- By Bruce W.
Perry. Special to Newsbytes. Who cares about that comely 50-kilobyte image on
the corporate home page if you're visually impaired? Nearly every new Web
page technology has something to do with the World Wide Web Consortium's Web
Accessibility Initiative (WAI) online at http://www.w3.org , which is
designed to open up the Web to everyone regardless of a disability.

The Consortium (W3C) published the most recent working draft of its "Web
Accessibility Guidelines User Agent" (e.g., for browsers) in July 1998 at
http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-WAI-USERAGENT .

The W3C, a consortium of several international universities, sets common
guidelines for how the Web is encoded and for the incorporation of multimedia
aspects such as images, sounds, and films. The Web browser or "user agent"
manufacturers follow the guidelines closely and help develop them.

The WAI is designed to make all Web pages accessible to users who cannot rely
on graphical browsers. These include the text or sound-based agents that are
used by disabled and able-bodied people.

There are about 750 million disabled people in the world, according to W3C,
outnumbering by a magnitude of two or three the number of people who now
access the Web.

"The W3C is committed to removing accessibility barriers for all people with
disabilities," said Tim Berners-Lee, the W3C's director. "We plan to work
aggressively with government, industry, and community leaders to establish
and attain Web accessibility goals."

The WAI, among numerous initiatives, would stipulate that all pictures and
"image maps" be linked with short or long text descriptions, and that users
should be able to toggle on and off an audio description of video, movies,
and animation.

Browser makers usually seek early incorporation of the W3C's standards, such
as HyperText Markup Language (HTML) 4.0, which are considered a fait
accompli.

The major technical developments for Web pages, including HTML 4.0 and
eXtensible Markup Language (XML), at least partly deal with the WAI. For
example, XML would allow Web-page generators to invent their own HTML
elements, which is expected to make it much easier for browser devices to
quickly grasp the meaning of pages and process them.

HTML 4.0 is tightly focused on Web accessibility, such as incorporating
"cascading style sheets" in the headers of documents, for instance, thus
making it very easy for a text or audio device to use common standards to
formulate a presentation of the page.

Not surprisingly, a visitor to the W3C Web pages will encounter few graphics,
particularly of the top-heavy variety.

(19980811/WAI Contact: Judy Brewer for W3C, 617-253-8036, Email
[log in to unmask] ONLINE, BUSINESS, PC/)


Bud Kennedy
email: [log in to unmask]