Web accessibility design: Is Your Web site Bobby approved?

For those unfamiliar with accessibility issues pertaining to Web page design, consider that many users may be operating in situations very different from your own. They may not be able to see or hear, or may have difficulty reading or comprehending text. They may not be able to use a keyboard or mouse. They may have a text-only screen, a small screen, an early version of a browser or a slow Internet connection. They may not speak or understand fluently the language in which the document is written. Content developers must consider these different situations when designing Web pages.

The World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/ explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities. The primary goal of these guidelines is to promote accessibility and they are intended for page authors, site designers and developers of authoring tools. These guidelines do not discourage content developers from using images, video, etc., but rather explain how to make multimedia content more accessible to a wide audience. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is part of a series of accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) that includes User Agent Accessibility Guidelines and Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines.

One Web-based tool that analyzes Web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities is Bobby http://www.cast.org/bobby/. The Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) offers Bobby as a free public service to further its mission to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through the innovative uses of computer technology. CAST developed the idea of a helpful "detective"-a Web-based entity that would expose barriers, encourage compliance with existing guidelines and teach Web designers about accessibility.

To analyze your Web site, just type in the URL of the page that you want Bobby to examine. Bobby will display a report indicating any accessibility and/or browser compatibility errors found on the page. Based on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Bobby will tell you if you provide text equivalents for images, animations, audio and video; if you provide summaries of graphs and charts, and if you ensure that all information conveyed in color also is available without color.

For additional resources on Web accessibility design, try WebABLE! http://www.webable.com/ and the AWARE Center http://aware.hwg.org/. WebABLE! lists hundreds of Internet-based resources, such as Web accessibility authoring and publishing support, services, tools, utilities and browsers. The AWARE Center (Accessible Web Authoring Resources and Education) began a year ago as a special project of the HTML Writers Guild with a focus on the importance of designing for universal accessibility and serves as a central resource for Web authors.

UB's Information Technology Coordination Committee has formed a Web Access subgroup with a charge to facilitate the university's compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The subgroup is looking for members for both the main subgroup and the standing work groups. Contact Peter Rittner prittner@buffalo.edu if you'd like to volunteer. The Action Plan is available at http://www.dcc.buffalo.edu/current/ExecutiveBoard/coord/ITCCWebAccessSubgroupActPlan.html.

Making the Web more accessible for users with various disabilities is to a great extent a matter of using HTML the way it was intended: to encode meaning, rather than appearance.

-Sue Neumeister and Lori Widzinski, University Libraries