Components of Web Accessibility

Version: Early Concept Draft 2004.08.27- chain
Note: This document is an unapproved draft and should not be distributed, referenced, or quoted under any circumstances. This document is under development by the Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG), and will be offered to other W3C groups and the public for review. A change log lists revisions in progress and links to previous versions.

Several different components of Web development and interaction must work together in order for the Web to be accessible to people with disabilities:

• content - the information on the Web site, including text, images, forms, sounds, etc.
• Web browsers, media players, and other "user agents"
• in some cases, assistive technology - screen readers, alternative keyboards, switches, scanning software, etc.
• users' knowledge, experiences, and in some cases, adaptive strategies using the Web
• developers (designers, coders, authors, etc. - which also includes "users" who contribute content and people with disabilities)
• authoring tools - software that creates Web sites
• evaluation tools - Web accessibility evaluation tools, HTML validators, CSS validators, etc.

Web developers usually use authoring tools and evaluation tools to create Web content.

People ("users") use Web browsers, media players, assistive technologies, or other "user agents" to access the content.

If one component is weak, sometimes other components can compensate; however, compensation usually involves much more effort and work arounds/kludges that are not good for accessibility overall. For example,

• developers can do more work to compensate for some lack of accessibility support in authoring tools
• user agents [@@ tweaks that then break other implementations]

When accessibility features are effectively implemented in one component, the other components are more likely to implement them.

• When user agents (including Web browser, media player, assistive technologies) support an accessibility feature, users are more likely to demand it and developers are more likely to implement it in their content.
• When an accessibility feature is implemented in most sites (content), developers and users are more likely to demand that user agents support it.
• When authoring tools make a feature easy to implement, developers are more likely to implement it in their content.
• When developers want to implement an accessibility feature, they are more likely to demand that their authoring tool make it easy to implement.

However, if one component does not implement an accessibility feature, there is little motivation for the other components to implement it when it does not result in an accessible user experience.

Understanding ...

Related Pages

Introduction to Web Accessibility provides additional information about Web Accessibility.

Document Information

Editor: Shawn Lawton Henry. This Web page is is under development by the EOWG.

Last updated $Date: 2004/08/29 03:09:45 $ by $Author: shawn $