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

The web is fundamentally designed to be available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, culture, location, or physical or mental ability.

The web should be accessible to everyone, including people with different levels of vision or hearing, different ranges of movement, different levels of literacy or cognitive function, different software, hardware or internet connection speeds.

The web radically changes the nature of disability - it removes barriers to communication and interaction. However, badly written web pages or technologies re-introduce these barriers.

The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative works to help legislators, programmers, developers, managers and site owners prevent such barriers reappearing.

See below for

• why make a web site accessible?
• what makes a website inaccessible?
• how to keep your web site accessible
• Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at W3C
• learn more
• current status of specifications and groups

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Why Make a Website Accessible?

The web must provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with diverse abilities. Article 9 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognizes web accessibility as a basic human right.

Keeping the web accessible to all is not only a matter of human rights; it also makes good business sense. Accessibility best practice substantially overlaps with best practice in disciplines such as mobile web design, device independence, multi-modal interaction, usability and search engine optimization. Case studies show accessible websites achieving better search results, reducing maintenance costs, and increasing their audience reach, among other benefits. Developing a Web Accessibility Business Case for Your Organization details the social, technical, financial, and legal benefits of web accessibility.

What Makes a Website Inaccessible?

Properly designed websites and web tools present no barriers to many people with disabilities. Unfortunately, some are developed with accessibility barriers that make it difficult or impossible for some people to use them. Below are just a few examples.

Alternative Text for Images

Alt text is the classic example. Images should include equivalent alternative text in the markup/code.

If alt text isn't provided for important images, the web page is inaccessible, for example, to people who cannot see and use a screen reader that reads aloud the information on a page, including the alt text for the visual image.

If equivalent alt text is provided, the information is available to people who cannot see the image for whatever reason – because they turned off images on their mobile phone to lower bandwidth charges, because their rural area only gets low bandwidth and they turned off images to speed download, or because they are blind – and it's also available to technologies that cannot see the image, such as search engines.

Keyboard Input

[ image of a
mouse Xed out
and maybe
a keyboard ]

Some people cannot use a mouse, including many older users with limited fine motor control. An accessible website does not rely on the mouse; it provides all functionality via a keyboard. Then people with disabilities can use assistive technologies that mimic the keyboard, such as speech input.

Transcripts for Podcasts

Just as images aren't available to people who can't see, audio files aren't available to people who can't hear. Proving a text transcript makes the audio information accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing (as well as to search engines and other technologies that can't hear).

Providing transcripts for podcasts and audio files is easy and relatively inexpensive. There are services where you can e-mail the audio file or point to it online, and they send you back a transcript in HTML for a nominal fee. Then do a quick read-through for quality assurance, put it in your website template, point to it from where the audio file is linked, and it's done.

How to Keep Your Website Accessible

Many accessibility barriers can be easily removed. However, the techniques required are poorly integrated into some web tools, education, and development process. If you are new to accessibility, it takes some time and effort to learn the common issues and solutions. A starting place is the Introduction to Web Accessibility.

Some accessibility barriers are more complicated and take more development time and effort to remove. W3C provides extensive resources to help with this, such as Understanding WCAG 2.0: A guide to understanding and implementing Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.

Using authoring tools that support accessibility makes it easier for website developers. Browsers also play a role in accessibility. Essential Components of Web Accessibility explains the relationships between the different components of web development and interaction.

Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at W3C

The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative brings together people from industry, disability organizations, government, and research labs from around the world to develop develop guidelines and resources to help make the web accessible to people with disabilities, including auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual disabilities.

Individuals and organizations can participate in WAI by volunteering to implement, promote, and review guidelines; by subscribing and contributing to the WAI interest group; or by regular and extensive participation in a working group.

Learn More

WAI provides a wide range of resources on different aspects web accessibility standards, education, implementation, and policy, including:

• Introduction to Web Accessibility
• Essential Components of Web Accessibility
• How People with Disabilities Use the Web
• Improving the Accessibility of Your Web Site
• Managing Accessibility
• Evaluating Web Accessibility
• Standards, guidelines, and techniques for making accessible
  • websites: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
  • authoring tools: Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG)
  • browsers: User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG)
  • web applications: Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA)
• Developing a Web Accessibility Business Case for Your Organization
• WAI home page highlights
• and more WAI Resources

Current Status of Specifications

Learn more about the current status of specifications related to:

These W3C Groups are working on the related specifications: