World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

"Leading the Web to its full potential"

• International, vendor-neutral consortium
• Multi-stakeholder, consensus process
• Open and royalty-free Web standards:
  • HTML, CSS, XML, SVG, SMIL, ...

W3C Structure

Operates from MIT, ERCIM, and Keio with ~350 Member Organizations from:

• Commercial Web industry
• Technology adopters
• Research & development
• User organizations
• Public institutions

Universality of the Web

One of W3C's primary goals is to make the benefits of technology available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability:

"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."

-- Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web, 1997

Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

WAI develops strategies, guidelines, resources to make the Web accessible:

• Accessibility support in W3C technologies
• Guidelines for implementing accessibility
• Methods for evaluating accessibility
• Conducting education and outreach
• Coordinating with Research and Development

What is Web Accessibility?

Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web.

• Universal design approach
  (aka "inclusive design" or "design for all")
• Cross-disability perspective
  people with hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive disabilites
• Cross-technological solution
  overlap with web usability, mobile web, ubiquituous web, ...

Web Accessibility Principles

Any content on the Web must be:

• Perceivable - Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive
• Operable - User interface components and navigation must be operable
• Understandable - Information and the operation of user interface must be understandable
• Robust - Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies

Examples of Accessibe Content

• Semantic structures using supported standards
  -- headings, lists, scripts, data, ...
• Images, video, and audio with alternative text
• Layout and font-sizes that adapt to users need
• Forms and controls that can be used by keyboard
• Consistent and predictable navigation and usage
• Device and browser independent operability

Benefits of Web Accessibility

Web accessibility benefits most users:

• Low literacy or computer skills
• Temporal functional limitations
• Situation or external influence
• Limited bandwidth connectivity
• Legacy hardware and software
• Mobile and PDA technology

Up to 65% can benefit from accessibility (source: Microsoft Research)

Resulting Business Benefits

Web accessibility provides business benefits:

• Increase audience reach and market share
• Reduce maintenance and redesign costs
• Increase server and bandwidth efficiency
• Support older and newer technologies
• Improve the access for mobile web users

Scope of Web Accessibility

Web accessibility is supported by several key components:

• Base Format - technologies such as (X)HTML, CSS, SVG, SMIL, PDF, Flash, Silverlight, ...
• Web Content - text, images, audio, video, code, markup, structure, presentation, ...
• User Agents - Web browsers, media players, browser plug-ins, assisitive technology, ...
• Authoring Tools - code editors, CMS, blog, wiki, save-as tools, conversion tools, ...

Components of Web Accessibility

Example of Accessible Publishing

WAI Accessibility Guidelines

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) develops and maintains:

• WCAG - Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
  http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag
• UAAG - User Agent Accessibility Guidelines
  http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/uaag
• ATAG - Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines
  http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/atag

Authoring Tool Accessibility

Authoring tools such as content management systems must:

• Produce accessible web content
  -- HTML, images, multimedia, documents, ...
• Provide an accessible interface
  -- editing, administrating, managing, ...

Status of ATAG

Status of the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG):

• ATAG 1.0 - operational version
• ATAG 2.0 - under development
  -- comments welcome!

Common Challenges

Accessibility challenges in the CMS include:

• Control over generated content
• WYSIWYG and rich text editing
• Captioning multimedia content
• Producing accessible documents
• Training the users of the CMS

Promising Developments

Recent developments that further enhance accessible authoring include:

• RDFa - connect semantic and metadata with the HTML
• WAI-ARIA - a taxonomy for roles, states, and events
• Voice Recognition - lowers the effort for captioning

Conclusions

• Accessibility leads to universality
• CMS is critical to Web accessibility
  • ... must produce accessible content
  • ... must provide accessible interfaces
• Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines
• Rich text editors are primary factors
• Promising developments for the future

Thank You!

Shadi Abou-Zahra, W3C/WAI
Activity Lead, WAI International Program Office
http://www.w3.org/People/shadi/