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New Technologies Open the Web to Everyone In today's competitive business environment, you know that every hit on your Web site could translate into dollars. So why would you design your Web site to exclude nearly 10% of your market? You wouldn't - on purpose. But that's exactly what you're doing if you create a site that people with disabilities can't access. Fortunately, several research organizations and industry associations are working to help Web designers find ways of making the Web accessible to everyone. Some of the solutions will not only help people with disabilities, but everyone who uses a computer - just like curb cuts help everyone who uses a sidewalk. Web Poses Barriers According to the U.S. Access Board, nearly 50 million people in the United States have some kind of functional limitation or disability. Approximately 15% of those people -- 7.75 million -- can't use a computer without some form of assistive technology, such as screen readers (which translate what's on the screen into Braille, voice output or audible cues), audio or text-only browsers, or alternative keyboards. It's also estimated that 8% of people who use the World Wide Web have disabilities. But as the page layouts on Web sites grow more complex, they pose challenges to these users. For example: Pages that rely heavily on users clicking a mouse are difficult for people with mobility impairments to navigate unless the browser provides keyboard alternatives; Frames, columns and tables can't be easily interpreted by screen readers, which read lines of text from left to right; Designers forget to include alternate text versions of images, image maps or images of text, rendering the information or even the site itself useless to anyone who's visually impaired, surfing the Net with in a text-only mode, or using a text-based browser; Audio clips are inaccessible to hearing-impaired users unless the site also provides transcripts; Applets can't be translated into text at all, although this is changing with the advent of the Java Accessibility API. "The Internet and technology have moved so quickly that assistive technology hasn't been able to catch up," says Josh Krieger of the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), a nonprofit organization that does research and development in the area of in what is known as universal design (UD). But people with disabilities don't want something special. They want what everyone else gets. The first step in meeting that pent-up demand is educating the Web community about the issue. But accessibility is about more than just making sure your site reaches a wider market. The U.S. government has passed several laws, most notably the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), to establish basic accessibility requirements. Recent Justice Department rulings imply that the U.S. government may require e-commerce, government and possibly even large corporate sites to comply with the same access guidelines as any other public accommodation. Designing Pages for Accessibility A number of groups and individuals are working through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to coordinate Web accessibility efforts. An international industry consortium, the W3C launched the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) in 1997. In February 1998, the WAI issued the first public working draft of its Web accessibility guidelines for page authoring. The guidelines offer strategies to help page designers structure their sites and format content so that it is accessible to users with disabilities. For example, W3C suggests that Web authors: Use style sheets to layout pages instead of HTML, which should be used instead for document structure; Design pages that promote easy orientation (numbered lists, titles, etc.); Provide alternative ways (such as captions, transcripts or text descriptions) to access information presented via images, sounds, applets, and scripts. In addition, browser vendors need to enable the use of the keyboard instead of the mouse to access hyperlinks and to navigate links, form fields and within and between pages. New Web Standards Intended as a way to organize information, HTML is, in and of itself, accessible. It's when designers use it in the way it wasn't intended - to control page layout - that they "break" accessibility, says Earl Johnson, who leads Sun Microsystems' Enabling Technologies group. For example, design "tricks" such as the use of tables as a way to format text makes it almost impossible for visually impaired users to access a page with assistive technology like screen readers. WAI and other groups are working to ensure that HTML and other new Web standards include enhancements to support accessibility. These standards include: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2 Extensible Markup Language (XML), which is designed to enable the use of Standardized General Markup Language (SGML) on the Web Extensible Style Language (XSL), which provides a way to add style (fonts, colors, spacing) to XML documents Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL), which will synchronize different media (audio, video, text and images), in on-line multimedia presentations. The use of CSS2 in particular will improve accessibility because it helps separate a Web page's content and structure from how it's displayed, says Jutta Treviranus, manager of the University of Toronto's Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC), which does research and development in the area of universal design. Thus, non-visual technology such as speech synthesizers, Braille readers, TTY devices and even cell phones can more easily access pages designed with CSS2. It also supports a variety of media types and even aural cascading style sheets that control voice inflection for text-to-speech systems. Another benefit is that CSS2 eliminates the need for hard-to-maintain separate "text- only" pages. (More information about the ways in which CSS2 improves accessibility can be found on WAI's Web site at www.w3.org/WAI/References/CSS2-access.) According to Judy Brewer, director of the WAI International Program Office, vendors need to incorporate support for CSS2 into browsers and authoring tools as well. "When style sheets are implemented in these tools, people writing pages can more easily use cascading style sheets when they design," says Brewer. "And browsers will display styled content the way authors intended." Design Vs. Accessibility? Experts working on accessibility agree that these new standards and guidelines will give Web page authors creative new options for designing their sites. "None of what we're promoting is counter to good Web design," says ATRC's Treviranus. "And any design trade-offs that do exist will lessen in the future as HTML and other protocols change." Gregg Vanderheiden, director of the Trace Research & Development Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agrees. "Good design and accessibility don't have to be contradictory," he says. "There are tools emerging that will unwrap the text in tables, and screen readers are being fixed so that they can read columns. And people can use graphical images, as long as page authors remember to provide alternative text." What Web designers and others in the industry should consider, says Mike Paciello, executive director of the Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation is how to serve content to people based upon their needs. "I'm 100% against telling anybody not to design a nice Web page," says Paciello. "It goes against the idea of innovation. But in order to provide pervasive accessibility, information needs to be served according to the user's preference." Carryover Benefits In fact, it's not only people with disabilities who need access to Web content in a format other than visual. In the near future, people will use an increasingly broad range of devices to browse the Internet. Specifications like CSS2, which allows control of audio presentation of Web content (using speech synthesis) will come in useful in these applications. For example, most displays on handheld computer devices like the PalmPilot are black-and- white, which eliminates the value of any color-coding on a page. And a small font size won't even show up, whether it's on a cellular phone or on a television with WebTV. "In some ways, users of these devices could be thought of as having a kind of visual disability," says CAST's Krieger. "They need a specialized display as much as people with low vision." In addition, many environments that are being explored for Web access - such as cars, factory floors or medical situations -- will need to provide "hands-free" or "vision-free" access to the Web. "Standards like SMIL can benefit not only people with disabilities but people in other environments - where there is a lot of noise, for instance, or where workers don't have access to visual displays," says W3C's Brewer. Supplying Web content in formats other than visual makes sense for an even more practical reason: information on the Internet needs to be searchable. Practices such as using images exclusively to represent text make searching, categorizing and archiving difficult. "Search engines need to be able to get at the information stored in an image, an audio/video clip, or a chart," says Krieger. "If you do things like build text into a .GIF file, that's not possible." Authoring Tools Automate Web Design More and more Web authors today are using page authoring tools to automate the creation of their sites. WAI and other groups are developing guidelines for manufacturers of commercial Web page authoring tools, as well as working with vendors themselves on new products. "We want the authoring tools themselves to make designing accessible pages as automatic as possible," says Brewer. For example, the University of Toronto's ATRC worked closely with SoftQuad on the release of their HoTMetaL 4.0 HTML authoring package in a partnership funded by the Canadian government. For the first time in a commercial authoring tool, this package includes features to help Web designers create accessible HTML documents. "If support for accessibility is built directly into the authoring tool, it has a better chance of reaching designers who might not otherwise seek out these guidelines," says Treviranus. HoTMetaL 4.0 emphasizes accessibility requirements such as alternative text (known as ALT- text) and ALT-content. It also features a descriptive text editor; a built-in HTML accessibility checker; accessibility prompting; and an extensive help system. You've Built Your Site, Now What? There are several tools available that let Web author evaluate their pages once they've built them. One of the most popular tools is Bobby, a free service from CAST that analyzes Web pages for their accessibility to both people with disabilities and those using older or text-based browsers. In addition to the on-line version of Bobby, CAST is developing a Bobby application written in the Java programming language that will test entire Web sites for accessibility. Meanwhile, Trace and ATRC are working on a support tool that vendors could integrate directly into their page authoring tools to verify accessibility and offer fixes as the page is being created. "The emphasis would be on creating accessible documents in the first place," says Treviranus. "It would make it easier to include things like ALT-text and appropriate titles for frames." Beyond Traditional Browsers W3C and others are working with vendors on guidelines for making accessible browsers, and for ensuring that the browser itself is designed to reveal accessibility features included in a page to assistive technology. But new developments may allow the user interface itself to act as the assistive technology. For example, the next version of Java technology includes a feature called the Pluggable Look-and- Feel, an architecture that separates the visual implementation of a user interface (how it works) from its presentation (how it looks). In other words, users could choose how they want to view (or hear) Web content based on how they are accessing the computer, without needing assistive technology to interpret the information. "The pluggable look-and-feel fits in perfectly with the tenets of universal design, which is based on the idea of presenting information in different modalities," says Treviranus. In fact, ATRC is working with Sun on an audio look-and-feel that will give visually impaired users access to Web content and structure. This could also be useful for people who need to browse the Web without looking at a display -- a surgeon in an operating room, for example. "We're trying to get away from a visual paradigm and get to task-oriented interfaces that give the user the ability to perform a task quickly," says Treviranus. "An audio look-and-feel will give functional information rather than describing decorative components that are only part of the visual layout." For example, Treviranus points out, an audio look-and-feel isn't constrained by the amount of visual space on a screen, which is what requires the use of features like pull-down menus. Information can instead be structured in a serial fashion. "The pluggable look-and-feel in Jthe Java programming environment is our first opportunity to get this type of information," Treviranus says. "Java technology is much easier to make accessible. It has a better structure and is friendlier to people trying to create access tools." Giving Control to Users These developments promise to give even more control to users to decide how they want to get the wealth of information available on the Internet. "Sure, maybe it's a Web author's responsibility to make sure that Web content is accessible," says Paciello. "But that assumes that the author 1) cares and 2) is human. In fact, a lot of Web content is being dynamically generated. Subsequently, because the server can identify the type of browser retrieving the information, the server can serve up the information in the format best suited for the browser (the client). "Our job is to focus on the best way to help ensure that Web content is always served in an accessible format. And we can do that by educating the Web community about the need for accessibility."