FINAL REPORT

DE 4105 - WAI

WEB ACCESSIBILITY INITIATIVE

W3C

Author: Daniel Dardailler

TELEMATICS APPLICATIONS PROGRAMME (DISABLED & ELDERLY SECTOR)

Telematics Applications Programme

Date: August 99 -- Version number: 1.0
This file: http://www.w3.org/WAI/DE4105/FinalReport

Table of content

Part I: Executive Summary

Part II: Final Report

1. Setting the Scene
2. Approach
3. Results and Achievements
4. Conclusions and future plans
5. Contact details
6. Appendixes

Part I: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

DE 4105 WAI
Web Accessibility Initiative

Setting the Scene

The World Wide Web is fast becoming the de facto repository of preference for on-line information, yet the technology of the Web has inadvertently created barriers for people with disabilities. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) coordinates the evolution of the Web core protocols (HTML, XML, CSS, SMIL, etc) and has a mission to "leading the Web to its full potential". W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has taken a leadership role in removing these accessibility barriers.

Approach

The Web and the Internet are global, so a global approach is required. To that effect, W3C has combined its own membership funds, plus various industries and government sponsoring with funding from the European Commission, to ensure that W3C staff members who coordinate the evolution of the Web protocols will work in this European action to ensure that the evolution removes, rather than reinforces, accessibility barriers.

Results and Achievements

The WAI DE 4105 four work-packages (Education, Tools, Standards, User Forum, plus one for Project Management) have all delivered as expected: more than 25 presentation were made in European public conferences; Outreach materials such as Quick Tips cards, leaflets, video, demonstration sites, and translations in several European languages were made; Tools were specified and written; Standard studies made and a very active User Forum launched and actively maintained. A particular effort throughout the project was made to ensure that the scope always included all disabilities, not only blind and visual impairment issues.

Conclusions and Plans for the Future

Even though we consider the project a success so far, the work is not done yet: a lot of awareness is still needed for users of existing technologies, in addition, new Web technologies are still coming out on the market at a rapid pace that potentially creates new challenges for people with disabilities. We are therefore proposing to continue this WAI European project in the fifth framework (IST) and focus on the European Education and Tools aspects of Web accessibility.

Contact Details

Project Name:
WAI - Web Accessibility Initiative

Research Area:
Web Accessibility for People with Disabilities

Timescale:
01.01.98 - 31.06.99

Budget:
Overall cost: 672000 ECU
European Commission contribution: 672000 ECU
Proposal Proposal: http://www.w3.org/WAI/DE4105/pp

Keywords:
Web, Web Accessibility, Education&Outreach, Assistive Tools.

Key Project Participants:

W3C/INRIA (FR)
FORTH (GR)

Project Coordinator:

Daniel Dardailler
Tel: +33 4 92 38 79 83
Fax: +33 4 92 38 78 22
E-mail: danield@w3.org
Project URL: http://www.w3.org/WAI/DE4105

Part II: FINAL REPORT

1. Setting the Scene

The emergence of the World Wide Web has made it possible for individuals with appropriate computer and telecommunications equipment to interact with society as never before. The Web is fast becoming the de facto repository of preference for on-line information, it is the infrastructure which will pave the way for next generation interfaces. However, it has inadvertently created barriers for people with disabilities.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C - http:/www.w3.org) is an international vendor-neutral organization which coordinates the evolution of the Web core protocol (such as HTML, CSS, XML, HTTP, etc) and has a mission to "leading the Web to its full potential". Part of this W3C's commitment is to promote a high degree of usability for people with disabilities.

As the the Web rapidly displaces existing media, there is an increasing social expectation for its accessibility and also a growing trend to require this accessibility. This, combined with the realization of the benefits that a Universal Design approach will bring to the Web at large (telephone users for instance, with no screen access), has led the W3C to take on a new leadership role and launch the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) program in 1997.

Current Situation

The current situation in the area of Web Accessibility is not very good and getting worse everyday as more and more people rush into the Web business without any awareness of the new limitations and frontiers they may create. No single disability population is unaffected. For example:

People who are deaf cannot hear multimedia or audio events that do not contain captioning or audio descriptions.
People who are blind struggle with the Web's inherent graphical interface, it's graphic-based content, and any Web protocol or application that cannot easily be rendered or accessed using audio, braille, large text or synthetic voice.
People with mobility impairment have difficulty using certain hardware devices or web controls, including Web kiosks and WebTV.
People who are cognitive impaired have difficulties interpreting most web pages because they have not been designed with this population in mind.

Worldwide, there are more than 750 million people with disabilities. A significant percentage of that population is affected by the emergence of the Web, directly or indirectly. For those without disabilities, the Web is a new technology that can help unify geographically dispersed groups. But these barriers put the Web in danger of disenfranchising people with disabilities in this emerging infrastructure.

Furthermore, even those without disabilities would benefit from many changes motivated by the needs of people with disabilities. When driving a car, for example, the driver may wish to browse the Web for information (movie schedules, etc.) using a voice-based interface similar to that used by the blind. This is usually referred to as the curb-cut effect, where an accessibility driven design (cut in the sidewalk to allow easy crossing by wheelchair users) is now benefiting mostly the mainstream population (baby or luggage carriers, bicycles, etc).

In conclusion to this backgrounder section: the Web needs to become more accessible and W3C's WAI was created to ensure just that. It is therefore perfectly suited to host and collaborate with this Telematics project.

2. Approach

Our approach to improving accessibility of the Web is based on the realization that a lot of things have to be done to reach our goal and that a limited European action like this one can take care of only some aspects but can greatly benefit from association with a larger initiative.

W3C has its own activity in the area of Web Access, also called WAI (and we use WAI-DE 4105 in this report to point at the Telematics project), that mostly focuses on technological groups working on the accessibility of the core Web formats such as HTML, XML, and CSS and also on a set of guidelines accompanying the technologies and the agents that are using them (Web browsing tools, HTML authoring tools, etc). It is organized to pursue accessibility of the Web through five areas of work:

Technology reviews and development. Centered on protocols and data formats, especially HTML, CSS, XML, SMIL, DOM.
Guidelines for use of the technology. Targeted at User Agent and Authoring tool developers, and Web Content.
Education&Outreach. Raising the awareness of the content creation community to the Accessible Design "philosophy".
Tools for evaluation and repair of Web Pages.
Research and advanced development.

From this list, the WAI-DE 4105 project has decided to concentrate on Education&Outreach in Europe, specification and prototyping of Tools and Standardization, with an umbrella User Forum Interest Group.

Approaches for each of these work-packages are detailed further down this section.

In order to meet this requirement of "globality" of Web Accessibility, W3C has combined its own membership funds, plus those of various industries and government sponsorship, with funding from the European Commission, to ensure that W3C staff members who coordinate the evolution of the Web protocols will work in this European action to ensure that the evolution removes, rather than reinforces, accessibility barriers.

It is important to note that this proposal is led by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international non-for-profit, vendor-neutral organization which fosters the evolution of the major Web protocol and format specifications, and whose goal is to lead the Web to its full potential (a long description of W3C is provided in the contact section). Being at the source of Web technology design allows us to address accessibility issues very early in the lifecycle and also to sensibilize technologists worldwide to the principles of Universal Design.

The WAI-DE 4105 Telematics proposal complements this W3C WAI technical work by addressing the content providers, the people that create and distribute the information, and the end-users (thru its user forum and tool workpackage). It focuses on the European Web content providers and market.

This approach enables different "stakeholders" in accessibility to work together at the design table. Over a hundred organizations from around the world participate in some part of WAI work, including: industry, disability organizations, access research centers, and governments.

As global as the Internet and the Web are, there is still a clear need for "local" actions when content providers are the target. A similar fund raising activity for education and dissemination is being persued by W3C for the Americas and the Pacific rim. We think all these actions are required for the Web as a whole to become more accessible.

At that point, it is worth detailing the relationship between the overall WAI project defined by W3C and this WAI action funded by EC Telematics.

Integration with W3C WAI

Since we want the integration between W3C WAI and WAI DE to be very tight, in order to maximise the leveraging of W3C actions in the DE project, we try to extend and improve the overall W3C WAI deliverable and charter documents, and point at them from the WAI DE deliverables.

W3C has a very formal framework for organizing its activities (along Working and Interest Groups, that first must define their charter, etc), called the W3C Process, and most WAI DE work-packages are also managed to fit under these rules.

To ensure that this integration is done well, the W3C WAI programme itself has a Steering Committee of its own, made of members chosen by the NSF, the European Commission (specified by the DE Program Director), disability organizations and from private sponsors (W3C industrial membership most likely).

This approach has led us to a very synergetic project with cooperation from disability organizations, researchers and engineers worldwide, not just limited to Europe.

Education&Outreach workplan

In order to reach our goal, we need to target different audiences. The content providers are our main target, since they will eventually decide what to put on the pages.

But for doing so, they use, listen, and are influenced by, several other actors: authoring tool vendors, web site designers, web-design educators, the press and the users base. In order to reach all these communities, we have to target our effort along a series of events: presentations/talks in major Web related conferences, organizations of free seminars at these conferences or isolated, direct contact and awareness action with major European web site providers, addition of accessibility "modules" in the curriculum of the major authoring tools educational process, direct contact and lobby with the major authoring tool providers, submission of papers in the press, etc.

Another educational aspect needs also to be explored: the education of the disability community itself regarding their rights with respect to accessing the information like everybody else.

This is particularly true and important in the Intranet context, where some countries are already subject to existing legislation regarding access (see the US ADA or the UK DDA) but where there's no point of contact or information to be trusted. Our Policy page will help in this regard.

We see the Education as perhaps the most important aspect of the entire W3C WAI work, but it is not something that falls easily within W3C's existing role (mostly technical). Clearly, part of this work should happen as part of the training program that comes with any Web authoring tool. But part of this work goes beyond individual tools, and is part of the traditional role of government: sensitizing the key players (content providers, in this case) to the needs of an important minority population with special needs.

Approach on Tools

As a logical step after working on improving the Web technologies and producing best practices guidelines, evaluation of Web Content is a vital stage in accessible design. Furthermore, once a problem has been identified, there is also a need for tools that can help repair the page elements that are not accessible.

In the course of project, we therefore decided to depart from our original goal, and not just limit the task of this workpackage to the study and prototyping of PICS in the context of accessibility (evaluation model only, using a somehow dated technology) but to work on the more general problem of implementing tools that provide Evaluation, Transformation and Repair of Web sites.

Since a lot of people and organizations are working on such tools within and outside W3C, and in order to converge on the measurement criteria for Web accessibility, we first need to put some effort into the coordination in the area of accessibility validation and tool prototypes. We also need to develop novel tools that end-users have expressed a need for.

Our approach here has been to create and closely integrate with a new W3C WAI activity focused on tools and supplement it with WAI-DE funded resources as needed.

This was organized around a W3C working group called ER (for Evaluation&Repair), with a charter to examine:

What features are needed for an evaluation tool? This includes the question of "rating", e.g. what if any weighting factors should be given to problems the evaluation tools detect?
What features are needed for a repair tool?
What features are needed for "filtering tools" used by end users to help make sites accessible to them.
How should features be packaged?
How should tools be made most usable?
Once tools are completed (e.g. in beta) what improvement may be made?

Our early work on PICS Rating System is usable in this context (see result) but more time need to be spent in the framework of this ER group on collecting and analyzing input from users who benefit from these tools, including users with disabilities, web authors and administrators, content owners, and tool vendors.

Standards

In order to determine precisely what could be the scope of any future standardisation activities regarding accessibility of Web-based interactive applications and services, an investigation has been undertaken covering the broad international state of the art.

This activity is aiming: (a) to identify and assess the international state of the art with regards to current, on-going and anticipated future standardisation activities related to Web accessibility; (b) to identify the requirements for Web accessibility and develop recommendations for meeting these requirements; and, (c) to disseminate the results to the relevant national, European and International standardisation bodies. A four-phase approach has been adopted by the project towards achieving the above objectives, comprising:

data collection, data analysis, consolidation & recommendations, and dissemination phases.

The data collection and data analysis phases provide a valuable insight towards what is currently missing from on-going activities related to accessibility guidelines, recommendations and standardisation work, as well as to how existing and future results can be propagated towards the relevant communities. Moreover, the analysis of the collected data enabled the derivation of several conclusions regarding the present coverage of the work on guidelines and recommendations, the current standardisation activities in the area of Web accessibility, and the existing policies and laws at national and European levels.

This task is also concerned with the identification of unified interaction requirements in Web-based applications and services. Based on such requirements, we derive recommendations and guidelines towards unified interaction in the Web; facilitation of accessible and high quality interfaces for user with different requirements, abilities and preferences, including disabled and elderly (i.e. following the concept of design for all).

It should be clarified that the present work is not at the same level as existing W3C WAI guidelines on Web accessibility. The latter are of immense practical value, as they offer Web developers immediate and concrete guidance as to how to render the Web content they produce accessible by people with different types of special requirements. The current work introduces a somewhat different perspective to the accessibility of Web technologies, with the aim to: (a) take a further step towards addressing the fullest possible range of user requirements, across the broad range of existing and forthcoming / future technologies; and (b) to overcome the difficulty that current accessibility guidelines and recommendations face in reaching standardisation bodies.

3. Results and Achievements

WP02: Education&Outreach

The goal of this dissemination/awareness workpackage was to promote the realization of accessible content throughout Europe.

It does so by developing strategies and materials to increase awareness in the Web community of the need for Web accessibility, and to educate the Web community regarding solutions to Web accessibility. The end-result shown here is primarily a list of public presentations where WAI specific materials are distributed or shown.

Because of the initial ramping up process to create a formal W3C groups on Education, this Work Package did not really start its activity before the end of March 1998, so as a result, the beginning and end dates (same duration) were shifted three months ahead (with approval from the Commission office).

During this period, a number of Events/Talks/Presentations promoting WAI were made in Europe by WAI-DE paid staff (this constitutes Deliverable D2.1 of the project proposal):

Mar 30 1998: Presentation at launch of W3C Office Symposium in Stockholm (Sweden) - audience was around hundred industrial representative of the Scandinavian countries.
Apr 1 1998: Keynote at Electronic Publishing - EP98 Conference in St-Malo (France)
Apr 2 1998: Presentation at launch of W3C Office Symposium in Utrecht (Holland) - about fifty industrial representatives.
May 16 1998: Panel session at Teleform Salon in Marseille (France)
Jun 2 1998: Presentation at INSERM workshop on Visual disabilities in Paris (France)
Jun 3 1998: WAI Session at Autonomic Conference and Exhibition in Paris (France)
Jun 23 1998: Presentation at TIDE Conference in Helsinki (Finland)
Jul 23 1998: Seminar at Sight Village in Birmingham (UK)
Jul 24-25 1998: WAI Meeting in Peterborough (UK) with BBC interview
September 26-28 1998: Presentation at Global Regional Leadership Conference, Conference of World Regions, two workshops Brussels, Belgium
October 19 1998: WAI presentation at 4th ERCIM WORKSHOP on "USER INTERFACES FOR ALL" in Stockholm.
October 1998: Start of conference tour on Web Accessibility in French Universities nationwide (Le Havre, Orleans, etc).
October 1998: Demonstration day on the Internet in French Schools.
November 19 1998: WAI Highlight talk on Web Authoring Tools Accessibility at the W3C Advisory Committee meeting in front of many European industrial representatives.
December 2 1998: Participation in User Friendly Panel at the IST'98 Conference in Vienna, presented WAI-DE activities.
December 8 1998: WAI & CSS Presentation at Technical Symposium in London at Royal Society for Art.
January 11 1999: Internet and Web Accessibility Seminar, ESSI engineering school Sophia-Antipolis, France
February 9 1999: Telematics in the education of the visually handicapped Paris, France
March 15 1999: Participation in European Regional Information Society Initiative via teleconference
March 19-21 1999: Invitation by the French Parliament to show Internet access issues to staff.
April 1 1999: WAI Seminar at Internetworld Prague, Chechoslovakia
April 22 1999: WAI session at W3C Office launching event Pisa, Italy
April 29 1999: Presentation in front of members of ANEC (European Association for Consumers Representation in Standardisation)
June 8 1999: WAI presentation W3C symposium Bad-Honnef, Germany
June 8 1999: Information Day at IRCAM Information Day for librarians.
June 9 1999: WAI seminar Webmaster conference INRA Montpellier, France
July 2 1999: Presentation at Websites and Cyberkiosques meeting Lisbon, Portugal

In addition, various European press and radio interviews and press releases were made during the period and we also submitted and included of a complete chapter (20 pages) on WAI in the "User Interfaces for All" book to be published in 1999 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Due to its participation in the project, EBU's 44 member organisations have been widely informed about WAI and the Guidelines. In particular, a simplified version of the WAI FAQ page was reproduced in issue No 23 of the EBU Newsletter. Some organisations which are in the process of starting their own sites have come back to us for more detailed information.

Materials developed by WAI-DE

The first three items constitutes the deliverable D2.2 of the project proposal (Accessibility modules and materials).

RNIB WAI Film: A 16 minute video film entitled "Websites that Work" on how people with disabilities access the Web was developed by our RNIB partner and launched at the "Global Cafe" in London in front of about 150 persons. The screening was aimed at Commissioners of Websites (e.g., from banking associations). This launch received good media interest and from disability organizations. An improvised awards ceremony was done at the same time.

The draft script of the film was provided in the December 1998 WAI-DE report and the film will be shown at the Final Review in September 1999 in Brussells.

We have already shown this movie in several settings and are planning continue in other parts of Europe. Several thousands copies of the video are planned to be produced and we are also looking at converting it in Web format (streamed, like RealAudio). There's a lot more we can do to make the most of the film.

See also the section below on the ERCIM CDRom.

CD Ercim: At the occasion of the 10th anniversary of ERCIM in 1999 (European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics), the ERCIM asked each member organizations (All 14 Computer Science National lab in Europe) to participate in a CDRom highlighting two important activities per institute.

For INRIA (host of W3C in Europe), WAI was chosen and a multimedia presentation was designed and incorporated into the anniversary CD. This presentation incorporates short clips of the WAI Film within a nice page setup suited for the CD layout. An additional filming session occured to complete the series of clips presenting WAI.

The CDRom will be demonstrated at final review time.

Demonstration site: In order to demonstrate the effect of accessible design on Web sites, an online demonstration was designed and implemented by WAI-DE participants.

The demo features a common frame-based web site layout (initially a real site fetched off the Web, but text was changed to respect privacy) in its inaccessible state. A simulation of browsing using an assistive technology browser (text-only) such as Lynx is then performed and then the demo goes in a tutorial mode on how to repair the site. The same site is then presented in its accessible form with and without Lynx.

The current version of this demo is online at:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/wcagdemo

The next three items constitutes the deliverable D2.3 of the project proposal (Education guideline Material).

BrailletNet Leaflet: Our french partner produced a leaflet on Web accessibility. This falls between guidelines (long) and Quick Tips (very short) in detail and complexity.

A french, english and spanish version are available on hard copy paper (laminated) ready to be distributed. The launch of this promotional material received national press attention.

A second version that should put the emphasis on cross-disability issues and not just on visual impairment is in the work. This is an important step forward for an organization such a BrailleNet to include not just blindness issues and this has happened through coordination with WAI.

Samples of the leaflet will be attached to the final report hard-copies.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) translations: In May 1999, the W3C releases a foundation document for Web Accessibility. This document is in english only and several translations in European langages were initiated by the WAI-DE project.

A mailing list setup at W3C was used to manage the translation work and the review of translated work. As of July 1999, we have the following translations completed: French version, German Translation, Norwegian translation, Swedish translation.

Additional translations in Danish, Dutch, Portugese and Spanish are in the work.

Quick Tips business cards translation: the W3C WAI EO activity has produced a 2-side business card summarizing the WAI Web Content Guidelines. These are meant to be distributed at conferences and events worldwide. This work was only partially funded by WAI-DE: the design of the card was done mostly my WAI-DE paid participants but the mass production (20000 copies) was paid for by other WAI funding (in the US).

The final version in english only so we also started a translation process in several European langages here. For now, only the french version is available.

Support documents (with help from WAI-DE)

Unlike the above list, which can be completely accounted as part of scheduled WAI-DE deliverables, the following resources where not primarily WAI-DE funded but some percentage of Commission fund was spent to come up with each of them (by way of participation in W3C's WAI EO working group by paid WAI-DE participants).

Event calendar: we maintain a global events page listing worldwide outreach events, used by the participants in the project to coordination presence in these events, including Europe.

Policy info page: this is a Policy References resource consisting of a review of current legislation applicable in the field of online and telecom accessibility worldwide, in which our European partners have actively participated.

This helped realized that Europe is lacking behind in terms of disability policy and as a result of coordination meetings, actions have been taken notably in Italy, Danemark, France, and Portugal.

For instance, in the case of Portugal, a recent major achievement was for the Portuguese Parliament to approve the Petition for the Accessibility of the Portuguese Internet as recommendation to the Government. This happened 30th of June 1999 and the Web Accessibility Initiate was mentioned in this parliament report.

Alternate browsers: this is a collection of pointers to information, and where possible, to demonstration versions of alternative browsing methods, different from traditional mouse-and-screen-based browsers. This was developed by a WAI European participant.

Other deliverables, such as the WAI slides set for seminar or the WAI logos for compliance with the guidelines, were also produced with help from personel paid by WAI-DE, acting as participants in the W3C WAI working groups.

WP03: Tools

The Project Proposal defined 4 deliverables in this workpackage:

D3.1: PICS compliant Rating System to assess Accessibility level of Web pages
D3.2: Integration in PC platforms.
D3.3: Pilot Label database on the Internet
D3.4: Operational Label Bureau

As explained in the approach section (and in intermediary reports), we departed from this original plan after realizing that developing a PICS rating (which was actually delivered last year) and running a PICS label bureau server was not very useful in itself and that we needed to work on evaluation criteria and repair tool aspects.

Our new set of deliverables now comprise:

A tool for Reporting Accessibility problem online, which has integrated the PICS rating system developed in the first semester of the project, into a system used by end-users on the web to report and store rating of web pages (this corresponds to D3.1 to D3.4 deliverables).
This report tool is the base of all our current Review campaingning actions, which can you see a presentation in the User Forum section below.
It is online and active at http://www.w3.org/WAI/report and is in constant improvement mode.
A table linearizer tool, written in Java, that can be used to transform a non-accessible HTML page into a version that can be accessed by blind users or cognitive impaired people.
This is a new deliverable not accounted in at the beginning but presented in the Annual report last year.
This tool can be downloaded at http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tablin.
A specification for rules used to replace rich media, such as image, applet, etc, with their textual equivalent. This is being used by external team coordinated with this WAI-DE workpackage in proxy implementations.

WP04: Standards

A indicated in the approach section, this workpackage followed a four-phase plan towards achieving its objectives, comprising data collection, data analysis, consolidation & recommendations, and dissemination phases.

The data collection and data analysis phases (reported in Deliverable 4.1 - see Appendix) provided a valuable insight towards what is currently missing from on-going activities related to accessibility guidelines, recommendations and standardisation work, as well as to how existing and future results can be propagated towards the relevant communities. Moreover, the analysis of the collected data enabled the derivation of several conclusions regarding the present coverage of the work on guidelines and recommendations, the current standardisation activities in the area of Web accessibility, and the existing policies and laws at national and European levels. The deliverable 4.3 (Appendix) presents a summarising account of the activities carried out in the context of the last two phases of the project, namely the consolidation & recommendations and dissemination phases, and focuses on the development of standardisation recommendations that cover issues not addressed by the existing sets of accessibility guidelines and recommendations.

More specifically, this final deliverable reports on:

The development of process-oriented guidelines and software technology requirements aiming, respectively, to: extend human-centred design practices to better account for accessibility; and, to guide the evolution of existing, or the introduction of new Web technologies, so that they are inherently accessible by the broadest possible range of end users, under a multitude of usage contexts.
The dissemination of the resulting recommendations in appropriate standardisation bodies; alternative target organisations, committees and actual standards have been considered, and a tentative recommendation and action plan has been formulated.

In particular, the development of standardisation recommendations in the present context aims to: (i) provide process-oriented guidance, through guidelines, on accessibility and universal design in HCI in general, and the development of Web-based applications and services in particular; and, (ii) translate the resulting guidelines into requirements that need to be met by the interaction platforms and the development tools, in order for them to provide the required support for building interactive applications and services accessible by the broadest possible end user population, including people with disabilities. The scope of the process-oriented design guidelines and the corresponding software technology requirements is deliberately broad in an attempt to provide a conceptual framework, independent of a particular technology / interaction platform, whereby universal accessibility is integrated in the development life-cycle of interactive applications and services. Specifically, the software technology requirements approach accessibility on the Web as an issue pertaining to interactive software with particular characteristics (e.g., presence of structural and presentational languages), so as to anticipate future developments and provide generic guidance that will be applicable beyond the current generation of relevant technologies.

Following the review of the current situation regarding standardisation work on Web accessibility and the consolidation of the collected data, alternative paths were examined and evaluated with the aim to define a specific dissemination strategy to be followed in the project. Three dissemination channels were identified as potential candidates for Web accessibility standards, namely: (a) standards on user-centred design; (b) standards on accessible design; and, (c) quality standards. The final action plan proposes two alternative dissemination strategies, taking into account the following criteria:

the scope and coverage of particular standard organisations;
the existing committees and the current standardisation activities that would be willing to accept new items in the specific field;
the processes followed in proposing new standardisation activities and the time required for the development of a standard.

The first of the aforementioned strategies, which would involve the addition of new recommendations to existing standards, was found to be difficult or, in some cases, unfeasible. The second, recommended strategy, involves the introduction of new parts in on-going standardisation activities. The recommendation is accompanied by a time schedule for further actions.

Please refer to the respective appendixes on 4.1 and 4.3 for details.

WP05: User Forum

This section constitutes deliverables 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 of the project proposal.

W3C's WAI maintains a User Forum as an online list which meets face-to-face regularly and that is also used by the WAI-DE project workpackages to gather user needs and requirements.

The Forum is up and running under the alias
w3c-wai-ig@w3.org

which is also the formal name of the W3C WAI overall Interest Group.

More than 350 persons are registered in this online forum, with an average traffic of more than 100 messages per month.

It is the best way to stay informed of overall WAI activities, and to participate in general WAI discussions.

A public archive of the most recent messages sent to this list is available at:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/ In parallel to this generic end-user activity, a direct campaigning action involving European end-users was conducted by WAI-DE.

The next section reports on some of its finding.

Review campaign and lobbying

Between October 1998 and February 1999, EBU (European Blind Users) and BrailleNet users conducted an experiment with direct reviewing and reporting of Web site accessibility problems, mostly in France (since this is where this organization is).

A study on the accessibility of 111 web sites has been conducted. The results of this study will be in a paper presented at the AAATE Conference which will take place in D�sseldorf, Germany, next November.

This study can be summarised as following:

The web sites belonged to several categories : newspapers, radio and television channels, national and international institutions, public services, culture, education, web sites related to impairment, leisure and so on.

The accessibility of those 111 web sites was evaluated according to the WAI recommendations. An evaluation with the help of the tool Bobby was not possible because each page should have been tested separately, and some accessibility problems cannot be evaluated automatically.

Two different browsers were used for the evaluation: Internet Explorer 3 with a Braille display and a screen reader, and BrailleSurf, the specific browser developed by INSERM, with a Braille display and a speech synthesiser.

In summary, over the 111 sites, about 20% are completely accessible, 20% rather accessible, 40% are not very accessible, and 20% are not accessible at all. The accessibility of the web sites does not depend on the category they belong. It only depends on the way the web site designer has developed his site.

The evaluation of these sites shows that on one hand, many web site designers intend to favour the visual design of the site to attract as many visitors as possible. On the other hand, other designers favour the access to information and the site accessibility like most of the sites of the international institutions.

Two categories of encountered problems can be distinguished: technical and conceptual problems. Some problems must be solved by the screen readers themselves, according to the evolution of the web technology. As for example image maps are more frequently used, and some screen readers still do not deal with those graphics, the developers of access software should better improve their software, instead of forbidding Web site designers to use image maps for their sites.

However, other problems must be solved by the web site author when he or she follows the WAI recommendations. The technical problems can be more or less easily solved, since it is often necessary to add a HTML element or attribute, or to change a text formulation to make the site accessible. On the other hand, the conceptual problems are more difficult to solve. As it is easier to make a site accessible before its creation, than make a site accessible that already exists.

The analysis of those 111 web sites shows a constant need to inform web site designers so that the WAI recommendations can be better taken into account. As a result, letters have been sent to webmasters of interesting web sites to inform them about the accessibility problems encountered on their web sites. Some design improvements were suggested and it was referred to the BrailleNet white paper and the WAI web site so that then can check the accessibility of their site and understand what could be changed to improve this accessibility. The table in Appendix shows the results of the letter actions.

In summary we can say that for many of these sites the accessibility is not a priority but commercial benefits are. Nevertheless we had some good results with some of them, which lead to a co-operation with webmasters to improve the site accessibility.

The value of this kind of letter campaign lies not so much into the breadth of sites involved (only french sites) but in the analysis of the kind of responses received from Webmaster and in their willingness to communicate with us about the accessibility problems on their documents.

4. Conclusions and Plans for the Future

5. Contact details

Project Consortium:WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) DE 4105

Contact address for the Project:

Daniel Dardailler
W3C/INRIA
2004 Route des Lucioles
06 902 Sophia Antipolis
FRANCE

Tel: +33 4 92 38 79 83
Fax: +33 4 92 38 78 22
E-mail: danield@w3.org
WWW: http://www.w3.org/WAI/DE4105

In addition to INRIA/W3C as the main contractor, ICS/FORTH is an associated contractor, and there are 4 sub-contractors: INSERM/BrailleNet, EBU and RNIB (for W3C/INRIA) and CNR (for FORTH). All the partners are non-for-profit organizations.

The project started in January 1998, ran for 18 months and had 5 Work Packages:

Project Management (W3C)
Education&Awareness (W3C, EBU, RNIB, BN) - 12 months only.
Rating&Certification(W3C, EBU, RNIB, BN)
Standardization (FORTH, CNR)
User Forum (W3C, EBU, RNIB, BN)

The Overall cost of the project was 672000 ECU and the European Commission contribution was 100% of these costs (support/accompanying action). The original Proposal Proposal is available online at the URL http://www.w3.org/WAI/DE4105/pp.

The following sections procide a description of the partners and contractors in the project.

World Wide Web Consortium

The W3C was founded in October 1994 to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability.

It's an international industry consortium, jointly hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science [MIT/LCS] in the United States; the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique [INRIA] in Europe; and the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan.

Services provided by the Consortium include: a repository of information about the World Wide Web for developers and users; reference code implementations to embody and promote standards; and various prototype and sample applications to demonstrate use of new technology.

The Consortium is led by Tim Berners-Lee, Director and creator of the World Wide Web, and Jean-François Abramatic, Chairman. W3C is funded by Member organizations (around 280 in August 1998), and is vendor neutral, working with the global community to produce specifications and reference software that is made freely available throughout the world.

W3C produces Recommendations, documents often called "W3C standards", that define and evolve the core languages and protocols of the Web: HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), etc.

W3C's main site is at http://www.w3.org

INSERM/BrailleNet (BN) Backgrounder

BrailleNet is a french consortium whose mission is to to promote the Internet for social, professional, and school integration of visually impaired people. Its objectives are to improve Internet access for visually impaired people, develops pilot web site, containing specific services, explore tele-working and education thru Internet and disseminate result of work to end-users.

The BrailleNet consortium regroups INSERM (French National Institute on Medical Research), EUROBRAILLE (first maker of Braille terminals), AFEI (specialized in the formation of visually impaired people), CNEFEI (specialized in the formation of teachers), ANPEA (National Association of Parents of Visually Impaired Children), FAF (Federation of Blind and Visually Impaires in France).

BrailleNet web site is http://www.ccr.jussieu.fr/braillenet

European Blind Union (EBU) Backgrounder

EBU is a non-governmental and non-profit making European organisation, founded in 1984. It is the principal organisation representing the interests of blind and partially sighted people in Europe with membership made up or organisations of and for visually impaired (VI) people in 43 European countries. EBU has formal consultative status as the co-ordinating NGO for the visual impairment sector on the European Disability Forum in Brussels.

EBU Web site is at: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/EBU_UEA

Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) Backgrounder

RNIB is the largest organisation in the UK looking after the needs of visually impaired people, with over 60 services. Current reappraisal of its work has led to services being increasingly considered in terms of supplying the needs of visually-impaired people at every stage of their lives and in various aspects. The organisation employs around 2500 people based throughout the UK, of whom 7% are visually-impaired. RNIB has already been involved as a partner in the CAPS (136/218) and Harmony (1226) projects.

RNIB web site is http://www.rnib.org.uk

Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (ICS/FORTH) Backgrounder

Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH, Greece), is a centre for research and development monitored by the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Technology (General Secretariat of Research and Technology) of the Greek Government. The Institute of Computer Science, one of the seven institutes of FORTH, conducts applied research, develops applications and products, and provides services. Current R&D activities focus on information systems, software engineering, parallel architectures and distributed systems, computer vision and robotics, digital communications, network management, machine learning, decision support systems, formal methods in concurrent systems, computer architectures and VLSI design, computer aided design, medical information systems, human-computer interaction, and rehabilitation tele-informatics. ICS-FORTH has a long research and development tradition in the design and development of user interfaces that are accessible and usable by a wide range of people, including disabled and elderly people. It has recently proposed the concept, and provided the technical framework for the development of unified user interfaces, that are adaptable to the abilities, requirements and preferences of the end user groups.

ICS/FORTH Web site is at http://www.ics.forth.gr

National Research Council (CNR) Backgrounder

The National Research Council (CNR, Italy) is a government research organisation (staff of about 7000), which is involved in activities addressing most disciplinary sectors (physics, chemistry, medicine, agriculture, etc), in cooperation with universities and industry (one of its tasks being the transfer of innovations to production and services).

CNR Web site is at http://www.cnr.it

6. Appendixes

Appendix A: IPR
Appendix B: WAI-DE Steering Committee
Appendix C:
Appendix D:
Appendix E:
Appendix X: Deliverable 4.1
Appendix X: Deliverable 4.3

Appendix A: IPR

There are no Intellectual Property Right associated with this project.

All the deliverables (Education material, Guidelines, Tools, etc) are for general Public access, delivered via the W3C WAI site.

The Telematics DE head office has empowered the W3C as the single entity who distributes the results from the project, provided that no commercial use is made.

The text of the agreement, signed by W3C, FORTH and TAP DE in February 1998, is:

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) through INRIA, as prime contractor for project DE4205-WAI, requests the permission of the Disabled & Elderly Sector of the TELEMATICS Applications Programme DGXIII to become the sole entity authorised to publicly distribute the results of the project. We certify that no commercial exploitation is intended and the results will be available free of charge on the W3C's WWW page. This request is made also on behalf of FORTH, partner in the DE4205-WAI project.

Appendix B: WAI-DE Steering Committee

WAI-DE has a Project Steering Committee that consists of the two main contractor managers, together with least one representative of each associated contractor and a Quality Panel representative. It is responsible for the overall strategy. It also has specific responsibility for ensuring that recommendations of the Quality Panel are adhered to by the Workpackage managers doing the technical and awareness developments and dissemination.

Besides face-to-face meeting, WAI-DE Project Steering Committee meets electronically under the alias: wai-tide@w3.org

The following people are on it:

Daniel Dardailler - W3C <danield@w3.org>
Constantine Stephanidis - FORTH <cs@ics.forth.gr>
Dominique Burger - INSERM/BrailleNet <dominique.Burger@snv.jussieu.fr>
Mokrane Boussaid - EBU <100616.1023@compuserve.com>
Pier Luigi Emiliani - CNR <ple@iroe.iroe.fi.cnr.it>
Elie de Vries - EBU DutchUnion <bureau@nvbs.nl>
Steven Tyler - RNIB <styler@rnib.org.uk>
Quality Panel representative - rotating <wai-tide-quality@w3.org>

This electronic mailing lists and a Web site, hosted at W3C, are used as the day-to-day management vehicle.

W3C acts as the overall project management contact and is responsible to communicating the reports and deliverables to the Commission.

Reports and deliverables will preferably be made available to the Commission using Electronic Mail and Web downloading site.

The Steering Committee or a subset of it (just the W3C sub-contractors for instance) also meets using Phone conference facilities provided by INRIA W3C office.

Appendix C

Appendix D

Appendix E

Appendix X: Deliverable 4.1

Introduction

A standardisation activity has been defined within the Work Package 4 of the WAI project, to ensure that the Web related access technologies will be propagate to the official standard bodies, such as the International Standards Organisation (ISO). The detailed objectives of this activity concern:

the identification and assessment of the international state of the art with regards to current, on-going and anticipated future standardisation activities;

the identification of requirements for Web accessibility and development of recommendations;

the dissemination of the results to the relevant national, European and International standardisation bodies.

To achieve these objectives a four-phase approach has been adopted: data collection, data analysis, consolidation & recommendations, and dissemination (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 - Phases of the project

As a first step, a thorough investigation of the international state of the art regarding ongoing work on accessibility guidelines, recommendations and standards, available policies and legislation, as well as prevailing concepts and principles for making the web accessible, has been conducted. The collected data has been subsequently analysed in the light of the emerging Web-applications and services and the current trends on Web technologies, and the specific points where further work or interventions need to be initiated have been identified.

This deliverable presents a summarising account of the activities carried out in this context, focusing on the data collection and analysis processes. More specifically, the deliverable reports on:

the selection of appropriate data collection, consolidation and dissemination methods, and a thorough investigation of the efforts related to web accessibility at European and International levels;

the analysis of the collected data regarding current development of guidelines and recommendations, standardisation activities and national policies aiming at identifying gaps and new requirements for standardisation work.

1. Data Collection

The objective of the data collection task was to review the current and on-going standardisation activities related to web accessibility, at European and International levels, considering current work on guidelines and recommendations, standardisation initiatives and national and international policies. Following the defined plan, the data collection phase started with a thorough investigation of the state of the art on web accessibility related standardisation activities focusing on:

the on-going work on guidelines and recommendations in the context of W3C Web Accessibility Initiative and other relevant initiatives;

related activities and actions in the context of national and international standardisation organisations; and

new proposals as formulated by the industry, designers and developers of web-based applications and services, and user organisations.

As a result of this activity, the current state of the development of guidelines and recommendations on Web accessibility has been documented, and a list of standardisation committees and existing and on-going standards where accessibility work could be propagated, has been drafted.

1.1 Data Collection Methods

This investigation has been conducted utilising alternative channels and data collection methods including direct contacts with relevant organisations, search of available material on the Internet, bibliographic review, and participation in appropriate conferences, workshops and scientific fora. More specifically, the data collection process has facilitated through:

the active involvement of FORTH in organisations and committees relevant to the WWW (e.g. W3C, UseWeb, Internet Society) and the disability community (e.g. RESNA, AAATE, COST 219, HELIOS-HANDYNET);

the involvement in standardisation organisations and committees at European (e.g. ETSI, CEN, CENELEC) and International levels (e.g. ISO);

the review of relevant bibliography and information available on the WWW;

the participation in related conferences and workshops; and

direct contacts with key actors in the disability, ergonomics and standardisation fields.

A list of the organisations that were reviewed, as well as the forums where initial work of this activity was presented is provided in Annex I.

1.2 Categories / type of data collected

The collected data concern guidelines, recommendations and standardisation efforts related to Web accessibility, as well as legislation and policies at national and international levels that provide the incentives to mainstream industry to adopt the accessibility guidelines and / or standards in their current development processes. Although the present investigation is focusing on Web accessibility issues, accessibility related efforts in other similar domains (e.g. telecommunications and information technology) are also reviewed and their potential impact on Web technologies is examined.

1.2.1 Guidelines and Recommendations

In order to obtain a broad and complete view of the existing guidelines for web accessibility the following categories of Web related technologies have been investigated: (a) Markup and structuring languages for creating Web documents (HTML, XML, CSS); (b) Authoring tools for creating accessible Web documents; (c) Web browsers and other user agents for presenting Web documents; and (d) Programming languages for developing Web-based applications.

A considerable effort has been made by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web consortium (W3C), to develop Accessibility Guidelines for the Web, collecting and elaborating on available guidelines and recommendations, and creating new guidelines for new Web technologies where previous work is not available. The majority of the guidelines for page authoring, authoring tools and user agents, have been developed in the context of W3C-WAI (http://www.w3.org/WAI).

HTML Accessibility Guidelines

The main topics of accessibility guidelines for developing web pages (in HTML Markup Language) are provided below:

Use appropriate ALT text for all graphics.

Make proper use of image maps.

Useful link text.

Use appropriate keyboard navigation.

Controls and applets.

Make frames accessible.

Make table accessible.

Support the reader's formatting options.

Make sure your page is usable when style sheets are turned off.

Provide file formats the reader can use.

Avoid using scrolling marquees

Provide titles for most objects

Provide text transcription / descriptions for audio clips

Provide text transcription / descriptions for video clips

And, test the page with text-only browser and graphics turned off.

Among the organisations, institutions and companies, which have contributed to the development of guidelines for Web accessibility, are W3C, MICROSOFT, IBM, LAWLINK and NSW. A complete list of organisations, institutions, universities and industries is provided in Annex I

XML Accessibility Guidelines

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML. Its goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML (for XML see also http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml). It is a product of the W3C XML Activity, details of which can be found at http://www.w3.org/XML. Currently, accessibility issues on XML are examined in the process of the WAI PF working group and also in the process of the development of XML itself, when the recommendations are reviewed by members of the W3C WAI activities.

CSS Accessibility Guidelines

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colours, spacing) to Web documents. The W3C has created specifications for the Cascading Style Sheet mechanism (CSS) which have become recommendations. The CSS level 1 language is human readable and writable, and expresses style in common desktop publishing terminology (see also http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1-961217.html).

CSS level 2 is a style sheet language that allows authors and users to attach style (e.g., fonts, spacing, and aural cues) to structured documents (e.g., HTML documents and XML applications). By separating the presentation style of documents from the content of documents, CSS2 simplifies Web authoring and site maintenance (see also http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/). CSS2 supports media-specific style sheets so that authors may tailor the presentation of their documents to visual browsers, aural devices, printers, Braille devices, handheld devices, etc. This specification also supports content positioning, downloadable fonts, table layout, features for internationalisation, automatic counters and numbering, and some properties related to user interface.

Actions to examine accessibility issues in CSS are part of the charter of the WAI Web Content Guidelines group. Also the capabilities offered by the CSS2 mechanism to separate the presentation style of Web documents and to support media-specific styles are beneficial for providing accessible interfaces to Web documents. Although the CSS specifications are reviewed, internally in W3C by members of the W3C WAI activities, specific efforts to address accessibility issues in CSS need to be initiated to explore the new possibilities offered by this mechanism.

Guidelines for Authoring Tools

Authoring tools guidelines are meant to help authoring tool developers and vendors design products that encourage authors of Web pages to adopt accessible authoring practices. The most complete list of guidelines is currently been developed by the WAI Authoring Tool working group of the W3C (http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/), and include guidelines and recommendations in the following sections:

Generate standard markup

Support all accessible content recommendations

Ensure that users may configure accessibility mechanisms

Emphasise accessible authoring practices

Identify all inaccessible markup

Provide mechanisms for authors to add missing alternative representations for the content of converted documents

Promote accessibility awareness in tool suites

Integrate accessibility solutions naturally

Provide comprehensive accessibility help to authors

Provide rationales that stress Universal Design

Package multimedia files with pre-written descriptions

Promote accessibility in all Help examples

Provide the author with progress feedback

Integrate accessibility solutions into relevant automated tools and wizards

Allow the user to check for and correct accessibility problems automatically

Ensure that conversion tools produce and retain accessible markup and content

Provide optional views of the edited document

Offer text representations of elements

Offer text representations of site maps

Guidelines for User Agents

User Agents Guidelines aiming to help user agent manufacturers to make their products more accessible to people with disabilities and for increasing usability for all users. User agents include browsers (graphic, text, voice, etc.), multimedia players, and assistive technology products such as screen readers, screen magnifiers, and voice input software. The most complete list of guidelines is currently been developed by the WAI User Agent working group of the W3C (http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/), and include guidelines and recommendations in the following sections:

Ensure that the user interface is accessible

Ensure that user agent accessibility features are configurable

Ensure that users can disable features that might interfere with accessibility

Provide documentation about accessibility features and ensure the documentation is accessible

Provide summary information about keyboard access

Allow users to interact with the and document in a device-independent manner

Allow the user to control document styles

Provide access to alternative representations of content and control of its rendering

Provide information about the content and structure of a document and the user interface

Provide information about document view and point of regard

Provide information about events that occur

Allow sequential keyboard navigation to structures within a document

Allow keyboard navigation of the document and views of the document

Allow the user to search for information on the page

Support language accessibility features

Use and provide accessible interfaces to other technologies

Java Accessibility Guidelines

These guidelines highlight the Java accessibility features and provide guidance to the application developers for creating accessible Java-based software. This is the industry's first set of Java application development guidelines for accessibility. The guidelines are available online at (http://www.austin.ibm.com/sns/snsjavag.html). The guidelines address the following topics:

Essential accessibility programming practices that, if used, make applications easy for disabled people to use.

The Java Foundation Classes (JFC), also known as Swing, and their implementation of accessibility methods in the user interface components. Application developers should take advantage of this easy way to incorporate accessibility into their designs.

The Java Accessibility API. If developers choose to create components themselves, they should implement this API.

These topics are covered in detail with supporting rationale, citing specific Java code, and providing examples where appropriate.

1.2.2 Standards

As web technology is new and innovative, there are no standards compiled, up to day, for web accessibility, from any national or international standards organisation. For this reason a number of existing general standards on accessibility are applied for web accessibility as well. In the present investigation, the following standards, from the ergonomics, and software engineering areas, have been selected as standards of potential interest for including standardisation items related to Web accessibility:

Draft International Standard (DIS) 13407, Human Centred Design process for interactive systems. International Standards Organisation, Geneva, Switzerland, 1997.

International Standard 9001, Quality Systems - Model for Quality Assurance in Design, Development, Production, Installation and Servicing. International Standards Organisation, Geneva, Switzerland, 1987.

Draft International Standard (DIS) 8402, Quality Vocabulary. International Standards Organisation, Geneva, Switzerland, 1994.

Draft ISO/IEC 14581-1: Information Technology Evaluation of Software products- General guide.

Draft International Standard (DIS) 9241-11, Ergonomic Requirements for office work with visual display terminals, Part 11: Guidance on Usability, International Standards Organisation, Geneva, Switzerland, 1997.

Draft International Standard (DIS) 14915 - Multimedia User Interface Design; Software Ergonomic Requirements

Draft ISO/IEC CD 9126 - Software quality characteristics and metrics

Draft ISO/IEC DIS 14598 - Evaluation of software products

1.2.3 Policies / Legislation

Similar efforts to develop accessibility guidelines and standards in other application domains like transportation, accessibility of places, computer accessibility, etc., have shown that the application of guidelines, recommendations or standards to mainstream technology products and services is not straightforward. Specific accessibility policies and rules at national and/or transnational levels have been developed, in most of these cases, to support and encourage the implementation of these guidelines and standards to the everyday products and services. The present investigation have reviewed accessibility related laws in the United States of America, the European Union, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Australia, that are directly or indirectly related to Web technology, and could provide the incentives for mainstream industry to adopt the developed guidelines and standards.

The related legislation in each country is provided below:

The United States of America

The Americans with Disability Act 1990

The Americans with Disability Act (ADA) is an unprecedented civil rights law which protects disabled people from discrimination in employment, transportation, and public accommodation. Specifically, the ADA requires that businesses and public accommodations take steps to insure that disabled individuals are not excluded from or denied services due to the absence of auxiliary aids. Captions are considered one type of auxiliary aid to make information accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing persons.

Television Decoder Circuitry Act 1990

The Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990 states that since July 1, 1993, all television sets with screens 13 inches or larger manufactured for sale in the U.S. must contain built-in closed-caption decoders. In addition to serving as a lifeline for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, captioning benefits people learning English as a second language and children and adults learning to read. The Caption Center is extremely proud to have played a prominent role in its passage- drafting language for the bill, testifying in its behalf before both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and assisting in the development of standards for decoder features. All decoder-equipped TV sets must now meet the standards issued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Television manufacturers may also incorporate optional features, such as Text Mode and changeable character colours.

The Telecommunications Act 1996

The goal of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is to let anyone enter any communications business and to let any communications business compete in any market against any other. This Act has the potential to change the way we work, live and learn. It will affect telephone service, local and long distance, cable programming and other video services, broadcast services and services provided to schools. Section 255(e) of this new law requires the Access Board, in conjunction with the Federal Communications Commission, to develop accessibility guidelines for telecommunications equipment and customer premises equipment within 18 months. The Board is also required to review and update the guidelines periodically. Specific provisions for accessibility are also included in section 251 "Interconnection" and section 305 "Video Programming Accessibility" of the same law.

The European Union

The Amsterdam Treaty 1997, article 6a & declaration 22

The Amsterdam Treaty does not directly address accessibility issues, however, it contains provisions against discrimination based on disability, as well as certain provisions in favour of persons with disabilities.

Article 6a

"Without prejudice to the other provisions of this Treaty and within the limits of the powers conferred by it upon the Community, the Council, acting unanimously on a proposal from the Commission and after consulting the European Parliament, may take appropriate action to combat discrimination based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation"

Declaration 22 (Declaration regarding persons with a disability)

The Conference agrees that, in drawing up measures under Article 100a of the Treaty establishing the European Community, the institutions of the Community shall take account of the needs of persons with a disability.

Sweden

Swedish Code of Statutes SFS 1993:387 (Act concerning Support and Service for Persons with Certain Functional Impairments passed on 27 May 1993)

This Act contains provisions relating to measures for special support and special service for those who are mentally retarded, are autistic or have a condition resembling autism, those who have a considerable and permanent, intellectual functional impairment after brain damage when an adult, the impairment being caused by external force or a physical illness, or those who have some other lasting physical or mental functional impairments which are manifestly not due to normal aging, if these impairments are major ones and cause considerable difficulties in daily life and, consequently, an extensive need for support and service.

The activities pursuant to this Act shall promote equality in living conditions and full participation in the life of the community for those categories of people referred in the previous paragraph. The objective shall be for it to be possible for the private individual concerned to live as others do.

United Kingdom

Disability Discrimination Act 1995 Chapter 50

This is an act to make it unlawful to discriminate against disabled persons in connection with employment, the provision of goods, facilities and services or the disposal or management of premises; to make provision about the employment of disabled persons; and to establish a National Disability Council.

Australia

The Disability Discrimination Act 1992

The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) provides protection for everyone in Australia against discrimination based on disability. Disability discrimination happens when you are treated less fairly than someone without a disability. The DDA makes it against the law to discriminate against you because of your disability in these areas of life: employment, education, access to premises used by the public, provision of goods, services and facilities, accommodation, buying land, clubs and associations, sport, administration of Commonwealth government laws and programs.

World Wide Web Access: Disability Discrimination Act Advisory Notes Version 2.1 1998

The Australian Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) is drawing attention to a range of resources that will help authors and designers make their World Wide Web documents accessible to the broadest possible audience. In these Advisory Notes HREOC aims to provide advice about how people can avoid disability discrimination without sacrificing the richness and variety of communication offered by the WWW.

These advisory notes are intended to assist people and organisations involved in developing or modifying World Wide Web documents, by making clearer what the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) are in this area and how they can be complied with. These notes do not have direct legal force or substitute for the provisions of the DDA itself. These notes are only concerned with equal accessibility of information and other services provided through the World Wide Web. They are not directly concerned with issues of availability and design of appropriate output equipment and software for users with a disability to gain access to material through the Internet. They do however seek to achieve compatibility of World Wide Web pages with equipment and systems commonly in use by people with a disability.

1.2.4 Concepts and Principles

In the context of the present investigation regarding the current situation on Web Accessibility related activities, it is important to mention the currently prevailing concepts and principles in the design and development of the new generation of information technology products, applications and services. Concepts like universal design, universal accessibility, design for all, user centred design, usability, context of use and quality in use, are broadly used as new design requirements, however their impact on Web Accessibility is not straightforward.

This section provides an account of the current interpretation of these terms, as well as contextual clarification, that are needed to facilitate a better understanding of their potential impact on accessibility of information technology applications and services in general, and Web technologies in particular.

Universal design

In the present context, the term is used to reflect a new concept, or philosophy for HCI design that recognises, respects, values and attempts to accommodate the broadest possible range of human abilities, requirements and preferences in the design of all computer-based products and environments (including Web-based applications and services). Thus, it promotes a design perspective that eliminates the need for "special features" and fosters individualisation and end-user acceptability. As already pointed out, the term universal design is used interchangeably with the term design for all users. This does not imply a single design solution suitable for all users. Instead, it should be interpreted as an effort to design products and services, in such a way, so as to suit the broadest possible end user population. In doing this, it is more than likely that there will be different solutions for different contexts of use (see also [Stephanidis et al, 1998]).

Universal accessibility

Accessibility is traditionally associated with disabled and elderly people and reflects the efforts devoted to the task of meeting prescribed code requirements for use by people with disabilities [Bergman and Johnson, 1995; Story, 1998]. However, due to recent technological developments (e.g., proliferation of interaction platforms, such as wireless computing, wearable equipment, user terminals), the range of the population which may gradually be confronted with accessibility problems extends beyond the population of disabled and elderly users.

In the present context (see also [Stephanidis et al, 1998]), accessibility implies the global requirement for access to information by individuals with different abilities, requirements and preferences, in a variety of contexts of use; the meaning of the term is intentionally broad to encompass accessibility challenges as posed by diversity in: (i) the target user population profile (including people with special needs) and their individual and cultural differences; (ii) the scope and nature of tasks (especially as related to the shift from business tasks to communication and collaboration intensive computer-mediated human activities); (iii) the technological platforms and associated devices through which information is accessed.

Usability, context of use and quality in use

In the recent literature, there are several definitions of the term usability. In the present context, we adopt the definition offered in ISO DIS 9241-11, though such a definition offers a performance-oriented perspective on usability: "usability is defined as the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use" [ISO, 1997a].

The context of use is defined as: "the nature of the users, tasks and physical and social environments in which a product is used" [ISO, 1997a].

The notion of quality is typically associated with various meanings and connotations (see also [Garvin, 1984], [Bevan, 1997]), while there is also variation with regards to how it can be achieved as part of the production process (e.g., [ISO, 1987]; [ISO, 1994]). In the present context (see also [Stephanidis et al, 1998]) quality in use covers both functional and non-functional attributes which determine computer-mediated human activities.

User-centred design

The term user-centred design appeared in the relevant literature as early as 1985 in the title of a book edited by Norman and Draper [Norman and Draper, 1986] and which was aiming to advance new perspectives in human computer interaction. More recently, the term Human Centred Design was introduced to denote a multi-disciplinary activity, which incorporates human factors and ergonomics knowledge and techniques, and advances an approach to interactive system development that focuses specifically on making systems usable [ISO, 1997b].

In the present context the term is associated with a collection of attitudes, approaches and design processes through which users are directly involved / consulted throughout an iterative system development process.

2. Data Analysis

The above data collection results provide an account of the current state of the art in relation to standardisation related activities on accessibility in general and Web accessibility in particular. Moreover, they provide a valuable insight towards what is currently missing from on-going standardisation work as well as how existing and future results can be propagated towards the relevant communities. From the analysis of the collected data, several conclusions can be derived regarding the present coverage of the work on guidelines and recommendations, the current standardisation activities in the area of Web accessibility, and the existing policies and laws at national and European levels.

2.1 Guidelines

Although there are significant efforts in developing guidelines and recommendations for accessible Web documents, the areas covered are limited considering the scope and rapid developments in Web technologies. A considerable effort has been made by W3C/WAI to collect and consolidate the existing guidelines and recommendations and provide a complete and unified set of accessibility guidelines as official W3C documents. The main conclusions of the conducted investigation are:

Existing (or under development) guidelines and recommendations are mainly focusing on the structure and presentation of Web documents (concerning individual guidelines, university or society guidelines, collective guidelines e.g. W3C);

Some recent efforts have been identified on developing guidelines for tools accessibility (browsers, authoring tools);

Accessibility guidelines and available recommendations mainly concern the requirements of blind users and the rendering of visual information in auditory form, while other categories of disabled users and general accessibility requirements of able bodied are not explicitly addressed;

Despite the availability of these guidelines, they are rarely followed by Web developers, content creators and service providers;

There is incompatibility between the features supported by the leading Web-browsers available in the market (e.g. Microsoft Internet Explorer versus Netscape Communicator that supports accessibility features of CSS);

2.2 Standards

Due to the short history of the Web and the rapid evolution of the associated technologies, official international or national standards in this field are not yet available. However, in many cases, de facto industry standards have been adopted by the Web community. Recently, standardisation organisations (e.g. IEEE - Internet Best Practices Study Group, Internet Society - Internet Engineering Task Force) have expressed an intention to start standardisation activities related to the Web, including accessibility. From the conducted investigation, the following conclusions can be derived:

Many organisations are currently involved (have started or plan to start activities) in standardisation in the area of Web Technologies (ISO, ANSI, CEN, IEEE, Internet Society, NISO);

The existing or on-going standards (on Web technologies) concern mainstream technologies, and there are not special efforts on accessibility;

A new working item on accessibility (in general, as an ergonomic element) has been recently accepted by the ISO TC 159 SC4 Working Group 5;

Accessibility standards are needed in core Web technologies, such as: (a) structural languages (e.g. HTML, XML), (b) presentation languages (e.g. CSS), (c) object models (e.g. DOM), (d) scripting (e.g. JavaScript, CGI), (e) emerging Web technologies (e.g. Web TV, Java, DHTML).

Recent interest has been shown in the provision of an accessible Information Society (in Europe) and Information Superhighways (in USA), and related initiatives are in progress (e.g. CEN/ISSS and European Commission Mandate SOGITS N1032-EN 06/05/98 in Europe).

A list of Standardisation Committees, where standardisation work on web accessibility could and should be propagated is provided in Annex II.

2.3 Policies

To make the guidelines and standards applicable to mainstream technology products, accessibility policies and rules need to be adopted. Currently, accessibility related laws are available in:

The United States of America (e.g. the Americans with disability Act 1990, Television Decoder Circuitry Act 1990, the Telecommunications Act 1996);

The European Union (e.g. The Amsterdam treaty 1997, article 6a & declaration 22);

Sweden (Swedish Code of Statutes SFS 1993:387);

United Kingdom (The Disability Discrimination Act 1995);

Australia (The Disability Discrimination Act 1992, World Wide Web Access: Disability Discrimination Act Advisory Notes Version 2.1 1998).

Despite the influence of these policies on software vendors, their impact on standards is still minimal.

3. Identification of gaps and new requirements

As discussed in the previous sections, the vast majority of existing guidelines for Web accessibility mainly focus either on page authoring, user agents, or the presentation of Web documents. By implication, such guidelines do not fully address structural languages (e.g. XML), presentation languages (e.g. CSS), scripting languages (e.g. JavaScript) and other properties which are typically related to the overall interaction platform. On the other hand, the proliferation of interaction platforms and their continuous growth (e.g. HTML, VRML, XML, DHTML, TVML), necessitate an account of key requirements that should be preserved if these developments and future ones are to comply with the broad accessibility objectives. Following this analysis the first conclusion and requirement for further work could be phrased as:

Specific efforts need to be made to identify the key requirements (at the level of the interaction platform) which would extend the current collection of guidelines on accessible Web design to new technologies.

In the context of the present investigation, several activities have been undertaken to identify accessibility guidelines relevant to an interaction platform, including:

Consolidation of existing materials (mainly from previous R&D efforts).

Preliminary analysis and identification of a critical mass of accessibility requirements at the level of the interaction platform.

Expert consultation in the course of a mini-workshop on "Accessibility and Standardisation" held in the context of the 2nd meeting of the International Scientific Forum on "Towards an Information Society for all", 18-19 June 1998, Heraklion, Greece.

A second conclusion of this investigation concern the different disability groups addressed by the current set of guidelines.

There is a need to broaden the coverage of accessibility guidelines by taking into account the particular requirements of other disabled user categories (other than Blind users, e.g. motor impaired users, deaf).

The existing work associated to the concepts of "design for all" and "universal accessibility" has not been taken into account in the current efforts to develop accessibility guidelines and it is not reflected in the available sets of guidelines, limiting their scope and restraining their applicability to new technologies.

Efforts need to be made to take into account the principles related to "design for all", and "universal accessibility" in the development of guidelines and recommendations, exploiting recent developments in the field.

Finally, the guidelines and recommendations need to be adopted by the mainstream industry, and be used for the development of the new generation of web-based applications and services. Standardisation activities and legislation could provide the incentives for the industries and developers towards this objective, but there are also technical requirements to integrate these guidelines in the design process and the software development tools. The following two requirements could be formulated to address the above issues:

Actions should be taken to standardise the developed guidelines and recommendations at national and international levels, and to develop specific policies and rules for supporting universal accessibility.

There is a need for process-oriented guidelines that will integrate accessibility guidelines, recommendations and standards, in the current and new generation of tools, applications and services, under the concept of design for all and universal accessibility.

In the course of the WP4 "Standardisation" of the WAI project, specific actions have been planned to address the identified gaps and requirements by: developing recommendations, disseminating the results of this investigation in related organisations, institutions, academic and industrial fora, and propagating the developed recommendations to the appropriate standardisation bodies.

References

Bergman, E., Johnson, E., 1995 Towards Accessible Human-Computer Interaction. In Nielsen, J., (Ed.), "Advances in Human-Computer Interaction", New Jersey, Ablex Publishing Corporation, vol. 5.

Bevan, N., 1997. Quality in Use: Incorporating Human Factors into the Software Engineering Life-cycle. In the Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Software Engineering Standards Symposium and Forum, Walnut Creek, CA: IEEE Computer Society, pp. 169-179.

Garvin, D., 1984. What Does "Product Quality" Really Mean? Sloane Management Review, Fall, pp. 25-48.

ISO, International Standard 9001 (1987). Quality Systems - Model for Quality Assurance in Design, Development, Production, Installation and Servicing. International Standards Organisation, Geneva, Switzerland.

ISO, Draft International Standard (DIS) 8402 (1994). Quality Vocabulary. International Standards Organisation, Geneva, Switzerland.

ISO, Draft International Standard (DIS) 9241-11 (1997a). Ergonomic Requirements for office work with visual display terminals, Part 11: Guidance on Usability, International Standards Organisation, Geneva, Switzerland.

ISO, Draft International Standard (DIS) 13407. (1997b). Human-Centred Design Processes for Interactive Systems. International Standards Organisation, Geneva, Switzerland.

Norman, A., D., Draper, W., S. (Eds.), 1986. User-centred system design: New perspectives in Human Computer Interaction, Hillsdale, NJ: LEA.

Stephanidis, C., Salvendy, G., Akoumianakis, D., Bevan, N., Brewer, J., Emiliani, P. L., Galetsas, A., Haataja, S., Iakovidis, I., Jacko, J., Jenkins, P., Karshmer, A., Korn, P., Marcus, A., Murphy, H., Stary, C., Vanderheiden, G., Weber, G., Ziegler, J., 1988. Towards an Information Society for All: An International R&D Agenda. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 10(2), pp. 107-134.

Story, M. F., 1998. Maximising Usability: The Principles of Universal Design. Assistive Technology, vol. 10 (1), pp. 4-12.

Annex I - List of reviewed organisations

Standardisation Organisations and Web related Committees / Societies

International Organisation for Standardisation - ISO

http://www.iso.ch/welcome.html

ISO 13.180 Ergonomics (http://www.iso.ch/cate/13180.html)
ISO/IEC JTC 1 Information Technology (http://www.iso.ch/meme/JTC1.html)
ISO/IEC JTC1 SC34/SC18 WG8 (http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/wg8/wg8home.htm)
ISO TC46 SC4 Computer applications in information and documentation (http://www.iso.ch/meme/TC46.html)
ISO TC159 SC 4 (http://www.iso.ch/liste/TC159SC4.html)
ISO/IEC Directives (ftp://ftp.iso.ch/pub/out/directives/en/dirpl.html)
Stages of the development of International Standards (http://www.iso.ch/infoe/proc.html)
Standards: User Interface Standards in the ISO Ergonomics Technical Committee (http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigchi/bulletin/1997.1/standards.html)

American National Standards Institute - ANSI

http://web.ansi.org/default_js.htm

ANSI Standards Action (http://www.doccenter.com/ansi_standards.html)

European Committee for Standardisation - CEN

http://www.cenorm.be/

CEN/ISSS - Information Society Standardisation System (http://www.cenorm.be/isss/default.htm)

IEEE Standards

http://standards.ieee.org/

IEEE Standards Association (http://standards.ieee.org/sa/index.html)

IEEE Standards Bearer (http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/SB/)
Internet Best Practices (http://computer.org/standard/Internet/)
Standards Working Group, Recommended Practice for Internet Practices - Web Page Engineering - Intranet/Extranet Applications IEEE CS Project P2001 (http://computer.org/standard/Internet/extranet/extranet.htm)
IEEE Standards Products Catalogue: Software Engineering (http://standards.ieee.org/catalog/software.html)

International Electrotechnical Commission - IEC

http://www.iec.ch/home-e.htm

IEC TC 3 Documentation and graphical symbols (http://www.iec.ch/tc3/home-e.htm)
IEC/TC3 - ISO/TC10 Special Joint Working Group 13 Future standardisation needs in th efield of documentation (http://www.hike.te.chiba-u.ac.jp/ikeda/IEC/3/sjwg13.html)

International Telecommunication Union - ITU

http://www.itu.int/

ITU Standardisation Sector (http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/index.html)
ITU-T Recommendations (http://www.itu.int/publications/itu-t/itut.htm)

European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardisation - CENELEC

http://www.cenelec.be/

European Telecommunications Standardisation Institute - ETSI

http://www.etsi.org/

ETSI Sub Technical Committee HF2 Human Factors for People with Special Needs - Telecommunication Facilities for People with Special Needs (http://www.etsi.org/brochures/stateart/egger.htm)

National Information Standards Organisation - NISO

http://www.niso.org/

NISO Developing International Standards (http://www.niso.org/internat.html)

Internet Society

http://www.isoc.org

Internet Society Standards (http://www.isoc.org/internet/standards/)
The Internet Engineering Task Force - IETF (http://www.ietf.org/)

World Wide Web Consortium - W3C

http://www.w3c.org/

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (http://www.w3c.org/WAI/)

Page Authoring Guidelines

http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-WAI-PAGEAUTH/

User Agent Guidelines

http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-WAI-USERAGENT/

Authoring Tool Guidelines

http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-WAI-AUTOOLS/

Australian World Wide Web Accessibility Standards for People with Disabilities

http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/lawlink.nsf/pages/wwwaccess

http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/lawlink.nsf/pages/access_guidelines

U.S. General Services, Administration, Office of Government wide Policy, Washington, D.C.

http://www.itpolicy.gsa.gov/cita/

Committees related to the Information Infrastructure

Global Information Infrastructure Commission

http://www.gii.org/index.html

The National Information Infrastructure (NII)

http://sunsite.unc.edu/nii/NII-Table-of-Contents.html

Information Superhighway (http://www.ntia.doc.gov/opadhome/infohigh.html)
Universal Design for the Information Highway (http://node.on.ca/networking/august1998/feature1.html)

Information Society Project Office

http://www.ispo.cec.be/

Information Society Initiatives in Standardisation (http://www.ispo.cec.be/isis/descript.htm)

Web Developers and Service Providers related Organisations

The HTML Writers Guild

http://www.hwg.org/lists/intro.html

The HWG Standards List (http://www.hwg.org/lists/hwg-standards/)

The Web Standards Project

http://www.webstandards.org/

Web Design Group

http://www.htmlhelp.com/

Web Design Group-Standards for HTML Authoring for the World Wide Web (http://www.htmlhelp.com/design/standards.html)

Best Viewed With Any Browser Campaign

http://www.anybrowser.hostnow.net/campaign/

Microsoft

Accessibility guidelines

http://www.microsoft.com/enable/dev/web.htm

IBM

Guidelines for writing accessible applications using Java

http://www.austin.ibm.com/sns/snsjavag.html

Guidelines for accessible notes

http://www.austin.ibm.com/sns/accessnotes.html

Starling Access Services

http://www.igs.net/~starling/acc/actoc.htm

Universities and other Research Institutes

Trace R&D centre, University of Wisconsin

http://trace.wisc.edu/docs/html_guidelines/version8.htm

University of Washington

http://weber.u.washington.edu/~doit/Brochures/Technology/Universal.design.html

University of Alberta

http://www.atl.ualberta.ca/events/cyc/wwwcode.html

Annex II - List of relevant standardisation committees

Standards of Immediate Interest

Committee	ISO TC159 Ergonomics
Related Standard	ISO 9241 Ergonomics of Work on Visual Display Terminals
Status	Final
Related Standard	ISO 14915 Multimedia User Interface Design
Status	on-going
Related Standard	ISO CD 13407 Human-centred design process for interactive systems
Status	Draft
Comments	Contribution to, and enhancement of, the last 2 standards with accessibility related work is possible since they are not yet accepted in their final form. Contribution could also be provided in the new work item on Accessibility that has been recently accepted by the Working Group 5, Sub-Committee 4 of the TC 159. New work items on Web accessibility from the perspective of ergonomics, human factors and user issues, could be proposed under this technical committee.

Committee	ISO/IEC JTC 1 Information Technology / SC 7 Software Engineering
Related Standard	ISO/IEC CD 9126 Software quality characteristics and metrics
Status	Draft
Related Standard	ISO/IEC DIS 14598 Evaluation of software products
Status	Draft
Comment	Contribution and enhancement of both standards to include Web accessibility issues from a software engineering point of view is possible since these standards are not yet accepted in their final form.

Committee	ETSI STC HF 2 Human Factors for People with Special Needs
Related Standard	None
Status	None
Comment	New work item on accessible telecommunication infrastructure and web-based services could be proposed.

Committee	CEN/ISSS Information Society Standardisation System
Related Standard	None
Status	None
Comment	New work item on accessibility requirements of web-based services in the emerging Information Society could be proposed.

Standards of Peripheral Interest

Committee	IEEE P2001 Web Page Engineering for Intranet/Extranet Environments (Well Engineered Web Page Guidelines)
Related Standard	None
Status	None
Comment	New work item on accessible Web-based work environments could be proposed.

Committee	Special Joint Working Group IEC/TC3-ISO/TC10 (SJWG/13) Future standardisation needs in the field of documentation
Related Standard	None
Status	None
Comment	New work item covering accessibility of the Web as a documentation medium could be proposed.

Committee	ISO TC46 Information and Documentation
Related Standard	None
Status	None
Comment	New work item covering accessibility of the Web as a documentation medium could be proposed.

Committee	IEEE P1063 Software User Documentation
Related Standard	None
Status	None
Comment	New work item covering accessibility of the Web as a documentation medium could be proposed.

Committee	ISO/IEC JTC 1 Information Technology / SC 34 Document Description and Processing Languages
Related Standard	None
Status	None
Comment	New work item covering accessibility of the Web as a documentation medium could be proposed.

Appendix X: Deliverable 4.3

Note: deliverable 4.2 was an draft version of 4.3.

1. Recap of Data Collection and Analysis

The data collection and analysis phases have resulted in the documentation of the current state of the art concerning the development of guidelines and recommendations on Web accessibility, and in the drafting of a list of standardisation committees and existing and on-going standards where accessibility work could be propagated. Moreover, the presented work has identified existing gaps in the process of developing accessibility standards, as well as new requirements imposed by the emergence of new Web technologies and Web-based applications and services; additionally, specific requirements for further standardisation work have been formulated.

In particular, as far as accessibility guidelines are concerned, the investigation and the subsequent analysis revealed that, although there are significant efforts in developing guidelines and recommendations for accessible Web documents, the areas covered are limited considering the scope and rapid developments in Web technologies. The main conclusions of the conducted investigation were:

Existing (or under development) guidelines and recommendations mainly focus on the structure and presentation of Web documents (this includes individual guidelines, university or society guidelines, collective guidelines - e.g. W3C).

Some recent efforts have addressed the development of guidelines for the accessibility of tools (user agents, authoring tools).

Accessibility guidelines and available recommendations mainly address the requirements of blind users and the rendering of visual information in non-visual forms (mainly auditory), while other categories of disabled users and general accessibility requirements of able-bodied individuals are not explicitly addressed.

Despite their availability, guidelines belonging to the above categories are rarely followed by Web developers, content creators and service providers.

There is incompatibility between the features (both accessibility-oriented and general ones) supported by the leading Web browsers available in the market (e.g. Microsoft Internet Explorer versus Netscape Communicator).

Regarding standardisation work on accessibility, it is likely that the only available standards related to accessibility are de facto industry standards, which have been adopted by the Web community and concern specific platforms, or proprietary technologies. Official international or national standards in this field are not yet available, due to the short history of the Web and the rapid evolution of the associated technologies. However, standardisation organisations (e.g. IEEE - Internet Best Practices Study Group, Internet Society - Internet Engineering Task Force) have recently expressed an intention to start standardisation activities related to the Web, including accessibility. From the analysis of the collected data the following conclusions were derived:

Many organisations are currently involved (have started or plan to start activities) in standardisation in the area of Web Technologies (ISO, ANSI, CEN, IEEE, Internet Society, NISO).

The existing or on-going standards (on Web technologies) concern mainstream technologies, and there are not special efforts on accessibility.

A new working item on accessibility (in general, as an ergonomic element) has been recently accepted by the ISO TC 159 SC4 WG5.

Accessibility standards are needed in core Web technologies, such as: (a) structural languages (e.g. HTML, XML), (b) presentation languages (e.g. CSS), (c) object models (e.g. DOM), (d) scripting (e.g. JavaScript), (e) emerging Web technologies (e.g. Java, DHTML).

Recent interest has been shown in the provision of an accessible Information Society (in Europe) and Information Superhighways (in USA), and related initiatives are in progress (e.g. CEN/ISSS and European Commission Mandate SOGITS N1032-EN 06/05/98 in Europe).

From the outcomes of the data collection and data analysis phases, it is evident that the vast majority of the available accessibility guidelines are formulated either as general design principles, or low-level and platform-specific recommendations. They are typically based on past experiences and best practice, while experimental evidence is typically rare [Casali, 1995]. Additionally, they cover specific user groups, such as blind and motor-impaired users, and provide guidance on how user interface software can be adapted to become accessible [Bergman and Johnson, 1995]. More specifically, in the case of the Web, accessibility guidelines (see http://www.w3c.org/WAI/) mainly concern requirements for the development of accessible Web Content, User Agents, and Authoring Tools. By implication, such guidelines do not fully address structural languages (e.g. XML), scripting languages and properties that are typically related to the overall interaction platform. On the other hand, the proliferation of interaction platforms and their continuous growth (e.g., HTML, VRML, XML, DHTML), necessitate an account of key requirements that should be preserved, if these developments and future ones are to comply with the broad accessibility objectives. Moreover, such guidelines offer limited guidance on the process of integrating accessibility into design and development activities.

2. Consolidation & Recommendations

2.1 Methodology

The currently available guidelines and recommendations related to accessibility are characterised by their rather narrow scope, which results from their association to a specific platform or technology (e.g. HTML accessibility guidelines), and the acknowledged bias towards the accessibility requirements of blind users. In contrast, the development of guidelines and recommendations explicitly targeted to standardisation activities requires the adoption of a more general approach to accessibility, which is independent of a specific technology platform and addresses the requirements of the broadest possible user population. To accommodate these requirements, the methodology followed in the project has adopted the general principles of design for all and universal accessibility as applied in Human Computer Interaction, as a basis for the development of accessibility guidelines and recommendations targeted to the various stages of the interactive software development life-cycle. As a result, a set of process-oriented guidelines has been developed, introducing the different steps in a design process, which need to be followed when designing for accessibility. Moreover, the implications of these guidelines upon user interface development have been translated to specific features that interaction technologies and respective development tools should support, in order to facilitate the development of accessible interactive applications and services. Specifically, the relevance of the developed design guidelines and software technology requirements, to the Web environment was examined, addressing both Web-based interaction platforms (e.g. HTML, XML, CSS, XLS, VRML, TVML, Java, etc.) and Web application development tools (e.g. HTML authoring tools, etc.).

Figure 1 presents the different steps followed during the project in the development of accessibility guidelines and recommendations, as well as their relevance to the current Web technology.

Requirements	Adopted Principles	Standardisation recommendations	Relevance to the Web Technology

Address the requirements of all potential users Address different contexts of use Support different interaction platforms	Design for All Universal Accessibility	Process-oriented guidelines Software technology requirements	Markup Languages Presentation Languages Modelling Languages User Agents Authoring Tools �

Figure 1 - The methodology followed in the development of accessibility related standardisation recommendations

2.2. Definition of terms

This section provides definitions of some of the key terms, as well as contextual clarification, that are needed to facilitate a better understanding of the range and scope of the material to be presented.

The term universal design or design for all (the two terms are used interchangeably in this deliverable) is frequently associated with different connotations [Story, 1998]. Some individuals consider it as a new, politically correct, term, referring to efforts to introduce �special features� for �special users� in the design of a product. To others, universal design is a deeply meaningful and rich topic that elevates what designers like to call �good user-based design� to a more encompassing concept of addressing the needs of all potential users. In the present context (see also [Stephanidis et al, 1998]) the term is used to reflect a new concept, or philosophy for HCI design that recognises, respects, values and attempts to accommodate the broadest possible range of human abilities, requirements and preferences in the design of all computer-based products and environments. Thus, it promotes a design perspective that eliminates the need for �special features� and fosters individualisation and end-user acceptability. As already pointed out, the term is used interchangeably with the term design for all users. This does not imply a single design solution suitable for all users. Instead, it should be interpreted as an effort to design products and services, in such a way, so as to suit the broadest possible end user population. In doing this, it is more than likely that there will be different solutions for different contexts of use.

Universal accessibility is traditionally associated with disabled and elderly people and reflects the efforts devoted to the task of meeting prescribed code requirements for use by people with disabilities [Bergman and Johnson, 1995; Story, 1998]. However, due to recent technological developments (e.g., proliferation of interaction platforms, such as wireless computing, wearable equipment, user terminals), the range of the population which may gradually be confronted with accessibility problems extends beyond the population of disabled and elderly users. In the present context (see also [Stephanidis et al, 1998]) universal accessibility implies the global requirement for access to information by individuals with different abilities, requirements and preferences, in a variety of contexts of use; the meaning of the term is intentionally broad to encompass accessibility challenges as posed by diversity in: (i) the target user population profile (including people with special needs) and their individual and cultural differences; (ii) the scope and nature of tasks (especially as related to the shift from business tasks to communication and collaboration intensive computer-mediated human activities); (iii) the technological platforms and associated devices through which information is accessed.

In the present context, the term interaction platform refers to any software tool providing implemented (or the means to implement) interaction elements which, in turn, can be used to construct a user interface. Such software tools include the traditional user interface development toolkits, such as Windows95^TM, Motif, Athena Widget Set, as well as some current and emerging Web technologies such as structural languages (e.g. HTML, XML), presentation languages (e.g. CSS), scripting languages (e.g. JavaScript) as well as emerging Web technologies such as WebTV, Java, etc.

To establish a clear connection between the software technology requirements and the Web technologies which they are addressing, this document employs a document-centred view of the latter, i.e., Web technologies are conceived as complementary languages, protocols, etc., which are used for the construction of documents, made up of information entities. Such entities may have a structural, presentational, or behavioural role (or combinations thereof), in general, or in the specific context of the document they appear.

Following the above assumptions, the term structural language will be used to refer to those constructs that enable the specification of the structure of a document, and in particular, the synthesis of a document from individual information entities. The term presentation languages will be used to refer to those constructs that enable the specification of the presentation attributes of information entities. Similarly, the term behaviour languages will be used to refer to those constructs that enable the specification of the interactive behaviour of information entities. Note that presentation is a mandatory prerequisite for behaviour (i.e., an entity cannot �behave�, if it is not somehow �presented� to the user), but the opposite is not necessary (i.e., an entity may have a physical �presence�, but no behaviour associated to it).

To facilitate the presentation and analysis of the software technology requirements, the present document adopts the model of Figure 2 for the decomposition of interactive software. This model has been derived as an abstraction of existing interactive software models, such as model-view-controller (MVC) [Goldberg & Robson, 1984], and presentation-abstraction-control (PAC) [Coutaz, 1990], as well as related meta-models, such as Seeheim [Green, 1985], and Arch [The UIMS Developers Workshop, 1992]. It should be noted that the model presented here does not seek to act as a generic interactive software structuring one, but rather to capture commonalties in the aforementioned models, and to introduce a (conceptual) separation between three main components of interactive software. Furthermore, note that the naming adopted for the components has been intentionally selected to relate to Web technologies.

According to this model, an interaction platform incorporates of complementary facilities that:

Support the definition of elements (information entities) that have uniquely defined semantics and a specific meaning for end users; these facilities are conceptually grouped under the content component of the model.

Support the definition, for each of the aforementioned elements, of presentation parameters / attributes that affect the way in which users perceive an element and the different (interaction or other) states it can assume; these facilities are conceptually grouped under the presentation component of the model.

Support the definition, for each of the aforementioned elements, of behavioural parameters / attributes that control how interaction with these elements affects the overall system state, as well as what the users conceive these effects to be; these facilities are conceptually grouped under the behaviour component of the model.

Figure 2: Generic model for interactive software.

It can be observed, that, according to the above model, a �complete� interaction platform on the Web would comprise a mixture of structural, presentation and �interaction� languages (e.g., combination of HTML, CSS and Javascript / DHTML). However, contemporary Web technologies diverge from the model in two main aspects: firstly, widely popular structural languages, like HTML, do not exhibit a clear separation between semantics (e.g., a paragraph of text) and presentation (e.g., the font in which a paragraph is presented); secondly, a large portion of the behaviour model of interactive elements is implicit and established by convention, due to its employment by vendors of popular Web-access user agents. The authors expect that both of the above shortcomings will be remedied through the evolution of Web technologies, especially in view of the accessibility problems that the lack of such a separation introduces.

Along the above lines, the term element will be used to refer to information entities, as these are defined by their structural, presentation and behaviour semantics as a whole. The term authoring tool will be used to refer to development tools / environments that enable the construction of documents, combining, as necessary, the languages that constitute a particular interaction platform on the Web. Finally, the term user agent will be used to refer to software applications that are capable of carrying out the presentation of, and support interaction with, documents developed for one or more interaction platforms.

2.3 Principles, guidelines and recommendations

The recent literature on accessibility and universal design provides several collections of general design principles, guidelines and recommendations for building accessibility into interactive computer-based products (see Figure 3). Design principles refer to high-level design objectives, which realise the notion of accessibility. Principles give rise to guidelines which may relate either to the syntactic- or physical-level of interaction [Akoumianakis and Stephanidis, 1998]. Guidelines are typically subject to further interpretation, so as to reflect the requirements of a particular organisation or design case. Finally, recommendations are unambiguous statements about physical artefacts.

Figure 3: Conceptual structure of accessibility requirements

To illustrate the contextual difference of the above terms, let us consider the following simple scenario:

"user is to carry out a text editing task. The user has mild motor impairments which delimit control to gross temporal movements, exercised through contact with the fist. Fingertips cannot be reliably employed due to tremor on key-press, while movements can be performed in timed patterns and upon demand."

Figure 4 depicts how a designer may progressively identify, select and interpret accessibility principles and guidelines into concrete recommendations. Thus, for instance, the software ergonomic principle which requires that: "the user interface should enable the user to initiate and accomplish a task" may translate to the two guidelines depicted in Figure 4, which in turn, give rise to recommendations of the physical "character" the interface.

However, neither the software ergonomic principle, nor the derived guidelines and recommendations offer any guidance to designers as to how they should proceed to identify and select appropriate interface components. Moreover, there is no account of any special features that the development tools should possess in order to realise a particular design.

To address the above, the present document presents: (a) three process-oriented design guidelines that extend user-centred design towards universal accessibility; and then (b) derives four software technology requirements for constructing interactive software platforms and tools that ensure accessibility by the broadest possible end user population, including people with disabilities. The intention is to extend the accumulated wisdom on accessibility and universal design in HCI, by focusing on the conduct of design, and by identifying required properties of user interface software technologies and development tools.

The present document argues that the above issues could be addressed by: (a) the formulation of process-oriented design guidelines, intended for designers, which identify steps to be followed within a human-centred life cycle; and (b) the derivation of software technology requirements, intended for interaction platform and development tools, which specify features that need to be supported by these technologies in order to construct interactive applications which are accessible by the broadest possible end user population, including people with disabilities.

Figure 4: Progressively identifying, selecting and interpreting principles and guidelines into concrete recommendations.

Our interest is not to suggest specific (alternative) interaction techniques to support accessibility by different user categories, including disabled and elderly people. Instead, we are concerned with process-oriented design guidelines and corresponding software technology requirements, which result in the development of interactive systems accessible by the broadest possible end user population. The process-oriented guidelines are intended for designers and identify steps to be followed within a human-centred life cycle. On the other hand, the derived software technology requirements provide guidance to developers of interaction platforms and development tools for interactive applications, as to the required features that these technologies should support. It is expected that these contributions augment the accumulated accessibility wisdom beyond mere adaptations, towards universal design practice.

2.4 Process-oriented guidelines

One important observation related to the accessibility of interactive applications and services by different user groups, including people with disabilities, is that no single interface implementation is likely to suffice for all different users. This simple observation leads to the conclusion that designing for the broadest possible end user population requires the provision of alternative interface manifestations depending on the abilities, requirements and preferences of the target user groups. To attain the above target requires a human-centred design activity, which has three additional key requirements, namely:

enumeration of design alternatives;

encapsulation of design alternatives into abstractions; and

rationalisation of the resulting design space.

Figure 5: Requirements for designing for the broadest possible end user population.

Figure 5 depicts these steps and reveals techniques that may be used to accomplish each one. These required steps could be formulated in the following design guidelines:

Guideline 1:

Designers should seek to identify and enumerate plausible design alternatives, suitable for the target user groups and contexts of use

Description

Design alternatives are necessitated by the different users and contexts of use, and provide a global view of task execution. This is to say that design alternatives offer rich insight into how a particular task may be accomplished by different users in different contexts of use. Since users differ with regards to abilities, requirements and preferences, tentative designs should aim to accommodate the broadest possible range of user capabilities, across different contexts of use. Thus, instead of restricting the design activity to producing a single outcome, designers should strive to compile design spaces containing plausible alternatives.

Guideline 2:

Plausible design alternatives should be encapsulated into extensible design abstractions

Description

Once the design space has been compiled and documented, the design activity should proceed towards the encapsulation of plausible alternatives into abstract design components which are reusable and extensible. The need for abstraction is two-fold. Firstly, abstractions may be used to de-couple a design concept from any particular physical realisation, which is bound to a specific interaction platform; thus, through abstractions, a design concept may be mapped onto alternative physical counterparts. Secondly, abstraction provide a mechanism to support incremental design and design updates, as requirements mature, or evolve; thus, the original design space may be extended to include new physical realisations, necessitated by new contexts of use, or made possible by novel interaction technologies.

Guideline 3:

Designers should rationalise the design space by exemplifying the logic for mapping design abstractions onto concrete user interface artefacts

Description

Rationalisation of the design space entails a principled approach to defining the reasoning behind each alternative. This enables the designer to map design abstractions to physical counterparts and provide the evidence for the mapping. In order to produce the necessary evidence, designers may have to assess alternatives with end users, or carry out experimentation to develop comparative results and decide on maximally preferred options. Such experimentation may be carried out using alternative user-centred design techniques, including subjective user assessments, performance measurement, GOMS analysis, etc. The need for rationalisation necessitates a shift from artefact-oriented design towards process-oriented and analytical design, whereby the reasoning behind an artefact is equally important as the artefact itself.

2.5 Software technology requirements

Having reviewed the process-oriented guidelines for universal design in HCI, this section aims to derive key software technology requirements related to Web-oriented interaction platforms, as well as to authoring tools and user agents supporting those platforms. In order to achieve this, we will briefly elaborate the implications of the design guidelines upon user interface development.

First of all, enumeration implies a conscious effort to populate design spaces (e.g., design pluralism) by extrapolating plausible usage scenarios and encountering artefacts suitable for different contexts of use. Moreover, many of these artefacts may be conveyed in different design languages and alternative modalities. Iterative prototyping of these artefacts demands the availability of tools to create versions which will enable users to experience and comment on the envisioned artefacts. Through such iterations, initial sketches become progressively high fidelity prototypes.

What is important to note is that a single user interface presentation will most likely not suffice to accommodate all plausible alternatives. Thus, developers will be confronted with the requirement to select and integrate different modalities (e.g., visual and non-visual ones) or media. However, it may also be the case that due to novel design properties, a specific platform (e.g. a behaviour language) may need to be augmented to support additional interactive behaviours, or the platform may need to be extended with elements that will encapsulate the new interaction semantics.

Secondly, encapsulation of alternatives into abstractions requires that developers need constructs to map abstract components to concrete interaction elements in a manner that is intuitive and relieved from the specifics (e.g., programming model) of a particular interaction platform. This, in turn, necessitates a shift towards specification of interactive behaviours rather than programming.

The above translate into several software technology requirements which need to be supported in order to provide the grounds for constructing universally accessible user interfaces. These requirements can be summarised as follows. An interaction platform is considered to provide comprehensive support for universal accessibility, when it meets the software technology requirements of abstraction, augmentation and expansion. An authoring tool, or a user agent is considered to provide comprehensive support for universal accessibility, when they meet the development requirement of platform integration. Figure 6 depicts the relation of the platform-level software technology requirements to the components of the interactive software model presented earlier. Similarly, Figure 7 depicts the relation of the tool-level development requirement to the components of the generic model for interactive software. Table 1 presents the same information collectively, in a tabular form.

Figure 6: Relation of the platform-level software technology requirements for accessibility, with interactive software components.

Figure 7: Relation of the tool-level software technology requirements for accessibility, with interactive software components.

Requirements Components	Abstraction	Augmentation	Expansion	Integration
Content	X		X	X
Presentation		X	X	X
Behaviour	X	X	X	X

Table 1: Relation of software technology requirements for accessibility, with interactive software components

In the remainder of this section, we review each one of those requirements and discuss its relevance to currently available and forthcoming Web technologies.

Requirement 1:

An interaction platform should support the abstract specification of element semantics and behaviour, de-coupled from specific input / output modalities and media.

Description and Rationale

Abstraction refers to the capability of a platform to support the specification of information entities and their respective interactive behaviour, by means of abstract interaction elements relieved from media or modality dependencies. The requirement for abstraction stems from the need to derive specifications of interaction constructs that can be reused across multiple categories of end users, with differing sensory and motor abilities and skills (which, in turn, may introduce different requirements in terms of how interactive entities are conceived and manipulated). For abstraction to be possible, there should also exist a well defined protocol for mapping abstract interaction entities to concrete elements in the underlying interaction platform.

According to the above, abstraction applies to the content and behaviour components of the interactive software model (see also Figure 2).

Relevance to the Web

When applied to Web technologies, abstraction is defined as : (i) the capability of structural languages to specify document contents in a media- and modality-independent manner; and (ii) the capability of behaviour languages to expose, and make available for manipulation, the platform- / content-specific behaviour of elements, in a manner that is entirely decoupled from physical interaction properties.

The requirement for media- and modality-independence posed above necessitates a strict separation of semantics and presentation description (e.g., document contents are described in HTML, while their presentation is specified in its entirety through CSS). Without this separation, semantic-level entities are unnecessarily bound to particular types of modalities or media, thus inevitably causing inaccessibility for certain users or within certain contexts of use. As an example of lack of such separation, consider the <P> (paragraph) tag in HTML, which, although a primarily semantic construct, contains modality specific attributes (e.g., alignment of the paragraph in a page) which are specific to visual presentation. It should be noted that a separation mechanism provided by the well documented abstraction model, enables the mapping of multiple alternative presentations to a single semantic entity at a time (pre-defined mapping scheme).

In terms of behaviour, abstract interaction objects are high-level interactive entities reflecting generic behavioural properties having no input syntax, interaction dialogue, and physical structure. Syntax, dialogue, and structure need to be defined separately within the interaction and presentation description. Thus, the respective description languages have to provide the facilities to define abstract interaction objects, and to define schemes for mapping these abstract objects to appropriate physical alternatives (i.e., concrete elements with specific physical structure, input syntax and interaction dialogue). Furthermore, a pre-defined collection of abstract interaction object classes and appropriate pre-defined mapping schemes should be provided.

Example (part 1)

The task within this example is to design a Web document that is usable by potentially all visitors, independently of their abilities or preferences, or of the context of use. This document shall provide the visitors with three choices. Approaches in the past to solve this task had a structure similar to the following:

The MENU tag includes the list of names to appear in a pull-down area and defines the width and font for this interaction element. Note that the attributes of the MENU tag, refer (and restrict) to visual presentation on screens. Furthermore, the I/O activities to select an option (i.e., input activity and visual feedback) is implicit and part of the related metaphor due to various widely acknowledged implementations of it.

Abstraction refers to the requirement to separate the presentation and the interactive behaviour (bound to specific input and output devices) from the content definition of an interaction element. This might result, for example, in the following abstract interaction object (AIO):

This representation relates neither to a specific medium or modality nor implies a metaphor for presentation. Abstraction provides a mechanism to link this abstract interaction object with both the presentation and the behaviour description.

One presentation description could be the following:

<2D-SELECTOR PRES=�2D-MENU� TITLE=�Choice� OPTIONS={�open�, �help�, �exit�}>

<2D-MENU TYPE=�MENU� WIDTH=�200� FONT=�ARIAL�>

(with MENU type e.g., as a predefined presentation primitive). Much in the same way, a separate description of the abstract object�s interactive behaviour (i.e., I/O strategy, dynamic behaviour, and functionality) is necessary. The following example describes the well-known interaction behaviour of a visual MENU implementation:

<2D-SELECTOR BEHAVIOUR=�2D-MENU�>

<2D-MENU ON-ENTER=�OPEN� ON-SCOPE=�HIGHLIGHT� ON-SELECT=�EXECUTE� ON-LEAVE=�CLOSE�>

Note that here it is also necessary to provide a mechanism to map the attribute values of an AIO definition to appropriate behaviour descriptions.

Requirement 2:

An interaction platform should provide facilities for augmenting the originally supported interaction techniques and presentation facilities with new ones, suitable for specific users and contexts of use.

Description and Rationale

Augmentation is defined as the design and implementation process through which additional presentation patterns or interaction techniques are �injected� into the original (native) set of presentation and interaction primitives supported by an interaction platform, thus leading to improved accessibility or enhanced interaction quality for specific user categories. The need for augmentation arises from the fact that it is sometimes desirable to provide extended presentation or interaction facilities, beyond the original collection, which address untypical, or unforeseen end-user requirements, or novel context of use. Newly introduced presentation patterns or interaction techniques become an integral part of the existing set of presentation and interaction primitives, while already existing software that makes use of the original primitives �inherits� the extra features, without requiring modifications or redevelopment.

Augmentation applies to the presentation and the behaviour components of the interactive software model (see also Figure 2).

Relevance to the Web

The need for augmentation arises mainly from shortcomings, or design deficiencies regarding the supplied presentation and interaction entities of existing Web-based interaction platforms (i.e., collections of content-, presentation-, and behaviour-descriptor �libraries�) and their interpretation by user agents. Moreover, since documents on the Web are built by utilising such �libraries�, these shortcomings and deficiencies are propagated to the recipients of these documents.

To facilitate augmentation for presentation, the presentation language has to provide the means to add new primitives to the basic set of (modality- or media-specific) attributes. This, for example, would entail the capability to introduce a new output medium (e.g., force-feedback tactile display) and the respective presentation attributes (e.g., �hardness�, �weight�). Such new primitives can subsequently be used together with the original set of attributes, to improve access to information, presented via the augmented modality or media. Augmentation supports this process via well-documented mechanisms.

The requirement for augmentation at the level of physical interaction facilities is evident, for example, in the case of providing access to HTML hyperlinks or clickable maps by motor-impaired users. In this case, additional interaction techniques are needed, which will enable motor-impaired users to access the documents interaction elements through specialised input devices (e.g., binary switches) by adding scanning functionality to the aforementioned interaction elements. To facilitate augmentation, the interaction language has to provide means to add new techniques to the basic set of interaction primitives.

Example (part 2)

Proceeding within the example, we assume now that the Web document is expected to be presented within a bright environment of use (e.g., public information kiosk). As a consequence, it is desirable to display the information with a certain level of contrast. Therefore, a new attribute needs to be introduced into the presentation description

<2D-MENU TYPE=�MENU� WIDTH=�200� FONT=�ARIAL� CONTRAST=�MAXIMUM�>

Augmentation facilitates the process of introducing additional attributes into the set of existing presentation attributes relating to certain media or modalities.

Regarding behaviour, augmentation enables the enrichment of the set of interaction primitives. In this example, it is assumed that people with motor impairments should have access to the information by using a single switch for interaction. Then, a modified interaction description needs to be created, augmented by a new interaction primitive (PUSH-SCOPE), that allows timed scanning through the available menu options:

<2D-MENU ON-ENTER=�OPEN� ON-SCOPE=�PUSH-SCOPE� ON-SELECT=�EXECUTE� ON-LEAVE=�CLOSE�>

Requirement 3:

An interaction platform should provide facilities for expanding the originally supported set of interaction elements with new ones, necessitated by domain-specific or application-specific functionality that needs to be presented as a separated self-contained interactive entity.

Description and Rationale

Expansion, over a particular interaction platform, is defined as the process through which new information entities, with well-defined semantics, presentation, and behaviour, are introduced, which were not originally supported by the platform. An important requirement of expansion is that all newly introduced objects are made available, in terms of the manipulation facilities offered, in exactly the same manner as original objects - in effect rendering �add-on� objects indistinguishable from original objects, both from the developer�s and the user�s point of view. The rationale for expansion arises from the fact that it is sometimes necessary to support domain-specific, or application-specific functionality that needs to be presented and made accessible as a separate self-contained interactive entity.

Expansion applies to all the components (i.e., content, presentation and behaviour) of the interactive software model (see also Figure 2).

Relevance to the Web

Expansion, regarding the semantic (content) layer of interactive software, refers to the process of introducing new objects to be used of Web documents� contents. Expansion, therefore, necessitates the presence of a framework that enables the introduction of new elements at the semantic level, and, at the same time, supports the specification of their presentation and behavioural attributes. It is important that such a framework equates newly introduced elements with the original ones, in terms of how developers and users perceive them. Furthermore, newly introduced elements should become �first-class citizens� of the interaction platform, so that abstraction and augmentation can be applied to them in the same way they are applied to pre-existing elements.

Expansion may be necessary when a new interaction metaphor needs to be embodied in the interaction platform. In this case, the target domain elements may have to be mapped to new source domain elements, to better convey their semantics and behaviour. Additionally, expansion may be necessitated in the case that new devices are introduced, which allow for additional presentational attributes, which are not considered by the interaction platform, or if new modalities are to be addressed. Typically, these new attributes will need to be defined and covered by new presentation objects.

Example (part 3)

We assume that, due to technological progress, the screen, used so far to display the information within the example, will be replaced by a device, that displays three-dimensional visual information. As a consequence, it is necessary to introduce a new metaphor with certain presentation and behaviour alternatives. In the example a new abstract interaction object (e.g., <POINTER>) needs to be defined, which consequently requires the semantic description of documents to be expandable. Expansion provides the mechanisms to introduce new abstract interaction objects into the content description and a mapping scheme to link these objects with the appropriate presentation and behaviour descriptions.

Furthermore, a new presentational description for 3-D objects is necessary i.e., a new type of objects with an own set of presentation attributes needs to be added.

Finally, regarding the behaviour, three-dimensional objects need to be addressed by additional interaction techniques (e.g., selection by cueing or grasping), which have to be defined separatedly. Expansion therefore provides the necessary methods to define and introduce these techniques.

Requirement 4:

Authoring tools and user agents should provide facilities to import and integrate new semantic, presentation, and interaction resources offered by different interaction platforms.

Description and Rationale

Platform integration entails the capability to import any interaction platform that may be required for the development of accessible information content, so that all interaction elements of the imported platform can be directly accounted by the original building techniques supported by an authoring tool. Additionally, user agents should be able to target alternative interaction platforms to the one(s) they were initially developed for, when provided with appropriate descriptions of these platforms. Platform integration is necessitated in cases where the interaction elements originally supported by a particular interaction platform do not suffice to provide support for a particular type of interaction (e.g., non-visual). In such cases, it is important to be able to utilise elements from alternative sources (e.g., external object libraries), offering the facilities required.

Integration applies to all the components (i.e., content, presentation and behaviour) of the interactive software model (see also Figure 2).

Relevance to the Web

Platform integration is of high relevance to the construction of accessible Web documents, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it introduces the possibility of employing and reusing accessibility concepts and solutions that have long existed in interactive environments other than the Web. Secondly, platform integration enables developers to incrementally introduce interaction platforms, accessible by different categories of target users, without reinvesting resources in the employment of alternative Web authoring tools. Thirdly, the very capability of integrating alternative accessible interaction platforms is expected to inform and educate developers concerning the accessibility issues their users face, and potential solutions to the resulting problems. Fourthly, end users can take advantage of a multitude of interaction platforms that better serve their temporal or permanent abilities and skills, as well as the different contexts of use in which they may find themselves, without having to resort to different user agents to do so. In whole, the integration of several platforms can contribute to the design of Web documents that are accessible for a maximally diverse target user population, within a variety of environments of use.

Example (part 4)

The choices that users are able to make within the Web document we have used as an example will be provided in additional modalities, so as to support for example blind users. Then, the former SELECTOR object needs to be represented in a tactile or audio instantiation as documented in Figure 8. To achieve this, solutions like audio screens or tactile maps, developed in other areas than the Web to solve the accessibility problem for blind users, could be used by integrating these specific interaction platforms into the user agents or authoring tools. Without the necessity to re-develop or "translate" solutions for a specific Web interaction platform, integration offers the opportunity to reuse these solutions simply by selecting appropriate interaction platforms from the variety of existing approaches. The capability to import, e.g., tactile or audio interaction modalities and media into the set of existing content, presentation, and behaviour primitives has to be provided by a well documented integration mechanism.

Figure 8: Examples of alternative SELECTOR instantiations

3. Dissemination

In the former sections of this report, we have described process-oriented guidelines and some software technology requirements, which have the potential of improving upon the practice of accessible design. We will now briefly discuss how the compiled recommendations may contribute to various on-going standardisation activities, thus outlining a potential action plan and a course of action. Our focus will be either on standardisation communities focusing on software ergonomics in general, or accessibility in particular.

3.1 Contribution to user-centred design standards

One popular process-oriented standard in software is ISO 13407 on Human Centred Design. Our tentative objective is to briefly review the design activities introduced in the Draft ISO 13407 on Human Centred Design [ISO, 1997b] and discuss the implications of the present work on the model presented therein. Our objective is to link explicitly the principles of design for all with Human Centred Design and to identify areas in which design for all extends and improves human-centred design practices.

Human Centred Design assumes four activities, which can be briefly summarised as understanding and specifying the context of use, specifying user and organisational requirements, producing design solutions and evaluating designs against requirements [ISO, 1997b]. The interdependence between the four activities is depicted in Figure 9.

Figure 9: Interdependence of Human Centred Design activities

Though there is no doubt as to whether, or not, designing for accessibility requires a user-centred protocol such as the above, there are several remarks that need to be made with regards to the conduct of design. First of all, enumeration requires that the design outcome is not constrained to a single artefact, but rather to design spaces, containing alternative options intended for different user groups, or contexts of use. To facilitate this, the study of requirements should be broad enough to convey the global task execution contexts. As a result, during the first two activities, designers should elicit requirements for all target user groups, using methods that are best suited for each case. There may be cases in which users do not possess a clear understanding of requirements, while in other cases, users may not be able to provide the required input. In both cases, prototyping may be part of the context and requirement elicitation inquiries, to provide specifications that are subsequently translated into high fidelity prototypes.

Secondly, abstraction and rationalisation require that design spaces are organised in such a way that they embody the required contextual information to differentiate plausible alternatives and specify when a particular option should be preferred from another. This body of knowledge, which is referred to as rationale, should clearly indicate why a design option is relevant, how it relates to specific objectives and the circumstances, or conditions under which it should be instantiated. To this end, the objectives of evaluation should not only be to test designs against requirements, but also to assess alternatives against criteria and to provide the empirical evidence that is needed for rationalisation.

From the above, it follows that, not only are the proposed guidelines compatible with the phases of Human Centred design, but they also enrich and extend the scope of design activities to also address the rationale behind design outcomes. It is also evident that, due to the above, the protocols for assessing adherence and compliance with ISO 13407 require revisions in several directions, before they can be used to assess accessibility. In particular, they should provide additional information on the construction of the design space, as well as the way in which selection is made within the respective design space. Such extensions, however, can easily be accommodated in the existing documentation intended to assess conformance.

3.2 Contribution to standards focusing on accessible design

In 1997 the ISO TC 159 / SC 4 / WG 5 launched a new work item on accessible software, deciding to produce a multi-part standard which would provide various insights into how accessibility can be supported in computer-based software products. At the time, it had also been decided that the Draft ANSI/HFES 200, Section 5 on Accessibility, once in final form, would constitute one part of that multi-part standard. Nevertheless, the committee pointed out very clearly that it would welcome new well-developed proposals on ergonomic design principles and accessibility criteria, requirements and guidelines, as additional parts to the standard. It should also be noted that part of the rationale for Work Package 4 of the WAI-DE was to facilitate this evolution by developing concrete proposals in the form of technical reports to be submitted to the above ISO committee.

The software technology requirements outlined in this document are distinctively different, in both content and scope, from the recommendations reported in the Draft ANSI/HFES 200, Section 5 on Accessibility. Thus, it is strongly believed that they could provide valuable input to the ISO accessibility standard, in the form of a new complementary part. The requirement for such a proposal to be considered is that it should be general enough and broadly relevant to software ergonomics. This is the primary reason which has influenced both the presentation and the elaboration of the principles presented in this document. In other words, our focal concern has been to provide general-purpose information on how accessible design may be attained and to exemplify as much as possible for the case of the Web and the technologies supported by W3C.

At the end of this effort, it is believed that the proposed process-oriented guidelines and the corresponding software technology requirements constitute a sufficiently elaborate code for practising accessible design in the computer-based interactive software development. At the same time, it is realised that additional efforts are still needed to precisely define the pathway through which these materials could reach the relevant standardisation communities. To this end, we outline a tentative action plan (see section 4.4), which, however, is not intended to be exhaustive or unitary.

3.3. Relevance to quality standards

Another standardisation community where accessibility bares relevance is the software quality community. However, the available quality standards adopt very different motivating principles and are intended for different communities. In particular, quality standards, until very recently, conveyed very different meanings to what quality is and how it can be attained. Thus, there have been at least three approaches to quality, focusing respectively on product quality, process quality and, more recently, quality in use (see Figure 10).

Figure 10: Approaches to software quality.

A representative standard adopting the software product quality view is ISO/IEC 9126, which breaks down quality into a number of characteristics and sub-characteristics (see Figure 11). The ISO/IEC 9126 characteristics and sub-characteristics provide a useful checklist of issues related to quality. The actual characteristics and sub-characteristics that are relevant in any particular situation, depend on the purpose of the evaluation, and should be identified by a quality-requirements study. This, however, is a �product� oriented view of quality [Garvin, 1984]: �an inherent characteristic of the product determined by the presence or absence of measurable product attributes�.

In this view, the quality of a software product can be specified and built-in as specific attributes of the code. The ISO/IEC 9126 definitions acknowledge that the objective of these attributes is to meet user needs in the form of functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency, maintainability and portability. But ISO 8402 makes it clear that a product-oriented view of quality should not be confused with measures of the �degree of excellence� resulting from the presence of absence of required attributes [ISO, 1994]. Moreover, the ISO 9000 series of standards are largely focused on quality as a manufacturing process, not addressing aspects of the final products, such as usability and user-perceived quality [ISO, 1987]. Yet the objective of quality from the user�s perspective is to achieve a degree of excellence in a particular context of use. Despite the apparent user orientation of ISO/IEC 9126, the definitions in terms of attributes imply that software quality should be specified and measured on the basis of attributes of the source code.

Figure 11: ISO/IEC 9126 quality model.

3.4 Action plan

Having discussed the potential target communities that can be influenced as a result of the current work, in this section we elaborate on a tentative action plan. To this end, we identify a portfolio of plausible alternative courses of action and discuss their relative pros and cons. Two main issues are important when deciding on the action plan. These are the type of recommendations to be made and their relevance to the life cycle of different standards. With regards to the type of recommendation, there are several options, which are depicted in Figure 12.

Figure 12: Possible types of recommendation.

On the other hand, the current status of standards� life cycle (see Figure 13) may determine whether or not, or what type of input may be possible.

Figure 13: Typical life-cycle of standards.

For example, there may be standards that have reached a point where no major modifications can be made and, therefore, cannot accommodate the present recommendations. Moreover, there may be standards which are under revision and could potentially include minor recommendations. From the above analysis, it follows that there are mainly two alternatives for introducing accessibility into international standardisation.

Option 1: New recommendation to existing standards

The first is to identify the relevance of accessibility across different thematic topics (e.g. usability, quality, software engineering, multimedia) and recommend specific clauses to be included in the respective standards. This option requires that accessibility is related explicitly to software ergonomics, quality models, software engineering processes, etc., and is sufficiently detailed to provide the required input. There are two main constraints which render this option unfeasible or more difficult. Firstly, the different standards to which accessibility bares a potential relevance, may have reached a final stage which does not allow any revisions to be made. This is for example the case with several of the parts of the ISO 9241 standard [ISO, 1997a]. Secondly, and more importantly, the relevance of accessibility to these communities is not uniform. Thus, for the product quality communities, accessibility would be yet another quality attribute, which would extend the model outlined above. However, the standard does not convey any particular code of practice through which such a quality could be attained. It can, therefore, be concluded that it is far more difficult to address all these communities using the vocabulary they are typically accustomed to and expect that accessibility will have an impact on the market.

Option 2 (recommended): New parts in on-going work

The second and recommended option, which bypasses all pragmatic or artificial impediments of the previous course of action, is to take advantage of the new work item within ISO TC 159 / SC 4 / WG 5 and prepare a concrete set of recommendations for new parts. The shortcoming of this option is that whatever is recommended must fall within the software ergonomics perspective. On the other hand, the advantage is that accessibility can be treated in a uniform manner with regards to what it entails and how it can be attained for computer-based interactive products and services. For this option to materialise, the proposers should follow a formal protocol according to which an official submission is made to the above committee. This submission will be discussed in one of its subsequent meetings to decide on the recommendation. As far as the current document is concerned, the intention of the responsible organisation is to undertake the actions described in the template below.

Standardisation community	ISO TC 159 / WC 4 / WG 5
Type of contribution	New recommendations / parts
Schedule	7/99: Submission to European Commission 8/99: Informal submission to Vice Convener of ISO TC 159/SC4/WG5 By end of year: Requested revisions implemented 2/2000: Formal submission to TC 159/SC4/WG5

Conclusions

In the context of Work Package 4 of the WAI-DE 4105 project, a review of the international state of the art in standardisation activities related to accessibility has been conducted, which made apparent that all current approaches to standardisation although useful, do not adequately address the issue of universal accessibility in the field of Human Computer Interaction in general, and the Web in particular. This has implications for many categories of potential users of the newly introduced interactive applications and services, and especially for disabled and elderly people, as they are not being accounted for by the de facto standards. At the same time, neither European Directives, nor ISO standards include any explicit clauses towards accessible interfaces. On the other hand, current efforts to develop accessibility guidelines and recommendations related to accessibility are characterised by their rather narrow scope, which results from their association to a specific platform or technology (e.g. HTML accessibility guidelines), and the acknowledged bias towards the accessibility requirements of blind users.

For this reason, an attempt was made in the context of the project, to provide recommendations that extend the focus and scope of current standardisation activities in relation to accessibility, based on the conducted investigation of the international state of the art with regards to current, on-going and anticipated future standardisation activities on Web accessibility, as well as on previous experience of the authors in the context of their participation in related projects of the European Community (TIDE-HEART Study, TIDE-ACCESS TP1001 Project). This work has adopted the general principles of design for all and universal accessibility as applied in Human Computer Interaction, as a basis for the development of accessibility guidelines and recommendations targeted to the various stages of the interactive software development life-cycle.

Specifically, this report has presented: (a) three design guidelines that characterise how designers should proceed when confronted with the challenge of designing interactive applications accessible by the broadest possible end user population, including people with disabilities; and (b) four software technology requirements that need to be taken into account when developing a new interactive platform or a development tool.

Furthermore, different alternative dissemination channels regarding potential influence in standardisation activities have been examined and evaluated, resulting in the selection of three dissemination channels which identified as potential candidates for Web accessibility standards, namely: (a) standards on user-centred design; (b) standards on accessible design; and, (c) quality standards. Finally, a specific action plan has been developed proposing two alternative dissemination strategies: (i) propose a new recommendation to existing standards, which in the opinion of the authors poses certain constraints, and (ii) propose a new part to on-going work, as for example the newly introduced work item on accessibility within ISO TC 159 / SC 4 / WG 5, which is likely to bypass the above constraints but any recommendation must fall within the software ergonomics perspective. The recommendation is accompanied by a time schedule for further actions.

References

Akoumianakis, D., Stephanidis, C., 1998. Propagating experience-based accessibility guidelines to user interface development. Submitted for publication.

Bergman, E., Johnson, E., 1995 Towards Accessible Human-Computer Interaction. In Nielsen, J., (Ed.), "Advances in Human-Computer Interaction", New Jersey, Ablex Publishing Corporation, vol. 5.

Casali, S. P., 1995. A physical skills-based strategy for choosing an appropriate interface method. In Edwards, A. D. N., (Ed.), Extra-ordinary Human Computer Interaction: Interfaces for people with disabilities, Cambridge University Press, pp. 315-342.

Coutaz, J., 1990. Architecture Models for Interactive Software: failures and trends. In G. Cockton (Ed.), Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction. Amsterdam, North-Holland: Elsevier Science, pp. 137-151.

Garvin, D., 1984. What Does �Product Quality� Really Mean? Sloane Management Review, Fall, pp. 25-48.

Goldberg, A., Robson, D., 1984. Smalltalk-80: The Interactive Programming Environment.
Addison-Wesley Publishing, Inc.

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Stephanidis, C., Salvendy, G., Akoumianakis, D., Bevan, N., Brewer, J., Emiliani, P. L., Galetsas, A., Haataja, S., Iakovidis, I., Jacko, J., Jenkins, P., Karshmer, A., Korn, P., Marcus, A., Murphy, H., Stary, C., Vanderheiden, G., Weber, G., Ziegler, J., 1998. Towards an Information Society for All: An International R&D Agenda. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 10(2), pp. 107-134.

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Appendix X: Letters to webmasters

Site name	Site url	Answer
Bibliothèque Nationale de France	www.bnf.fr	No answer but the site has become more accessible
Les trois Suisses	www.3suisses.fr	No answer, no improvement
Reporters sans frontières	www.rsf.fr	No answer
Futuroscope	www.futuroscope.org	We are aware of the problem but it is difficult to solve. Moreover those users belong to a small category of users and we cannot take everyone into account.
Le livre de jeunesse	www.cplj.fr	They wanted to do their best to make the site accessible, and the site has become more accessible.
5th French Television Channel	www.lacinquieme.fr	Positive answer, but no results yet.
French Parliament	www.assemblee-nat.fr	Positive answer. The site will be more accessible.
Mairie of Villeurbanne	www.mairie-villeurbanne.fr	No answer
The Newspaper Libération	www.liberation.com	They are aware of the problem but...
Autonomic exhibition	www.autonomic-expo.com	An answer but no changes
News agency AFP	www.afp.com	The answer was not clear, no changes.
Poste office	www.laposte.fr	No answer
Site of the Prime Minister	www.premier-ministre.gouv.fr	Positive answer, meeting with the person in charge of the site.
Chilian Newspaper	www.lanacion.com	Positive answer. An evaluation of the accessibility of the site has been sent, waiting for results.
Newspaper Le Monde	www.lemonde.fr	Positive answer. Improvements on the site
webcity, leisure newspaper for Paris	www.cyberparis.com	No positive answer, no interest
The Quid, encyclopedia	www.quid.fr	no answer
Railway company	www.sncf.fr	no answer
Television Newspaper	www.telerama.fr	No answer
Literary magazine	www.magazine-litteraire.fr	no answer
Newspaper l'est républicain	www.estrepublicain.fr	no answer
French German Office for the Youth	www.ofaj.com	no answer

BACK PAGE

The Project WAI-DE (Web Accessibility Initiative - Disabled and Elderly sector) has been supported by the European Commission under the auspices of the TELEMATICS APPLICATIONS Programme.

Telematics Applications Programme

Further information on the TELEMATICS APPLICATIONS Programme:

You can obtain more information on the projects of the TELEMATICS APPLICATIONS Programme from:

European Commission, DG XIII, C/1
TELEMATIC APPLICATIONS Programme Information desk
Rue de la Loi 200 - BU 29 - 04/05
B - 1049 Brussels
Fax: +32 2 295 23 54
E-mail: telematics@dg13.cec.be

Or on the TELEMATICS APPLICATIONS Programmes homepage:
http://www.echo.lu/telematics

Part I: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

DE 4105 WAIWeb Accessibility Initiative

Setting the Scene

Approach

Results and Achievements

Conclusions and Plans for the Future

Contact Details

Part II: FINAL REPORT

Current Situation

Integration with W3C WAI

Education&Outreach workplan

Approach on Tools

Standards

WP02: Education&Outreach

Materials developed by WAI-DE

Support documents (with help from WAI-DE)

WP03: Tools

WP04: Standards

WP05: User Forum

Review campaign and lobbying

European Blind Union (EBU) Backgrounder

Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) Backgrounder

Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (ICS/FORTH) Backgrounder

National Research Council (CNR) Backgrounder

1. Recap of Data Collection and Analysis

2. Consolidation & Recommendations

3. Dissemination

DE 4105 WAI
Web Accessibility Initiative