The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has issued guidelines to make
Web browsers and multimedia players more accessible to disabled
persons.
The W3C's User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 1.0 is a
formal W3C recommendation, meaning it is "essentially an Internet
standard for browser and media player design", said Judy Brewer,
director of Web accessibility at W3C.
"The accessibility [effort is about] making sure that regardless of
what kind of disability, people can still get the information from
a Web site," she said.
Written for software developers, the W3C recommendation represents
consensus among developers and the disability community on
accessibility features needed in browsers and multimedia players
used to access the Web.
Examples of enabling disabled access include making browser
commands accessible on a keyboard for those who cannot use a mouse
and support for screen reader technology, which intercepts what is
on a screen and directs it to a speech synthesiser or refreshable
braille device for the blind.
"There are millions of blind people using the Web," she said,
noting that some of the features in the W3C guidelines are already
being implemented in products.
UAAG 1.0 addresses HTML and XHTML browsers, multimedia players,
graphics viewers and assistive technologies. The recommendation is
the third in a series of recommendations on Web accessibility,
following Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and Authoring
Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.
The UAAG Working Group at W3C has also produced a related test
suite, interactive forms for evaluation and a techniques document
with detailed information on implementation in different markup
languages and user agent types.