People With Disabilities Reach for Web Access

Setting Site Standards

Full-access issues affect a substantial number of people. For example, the National Federation of the Blind estimates that more than 850,000 people in the United States are blind.

"This should concern Internet companies who are not working on accessibility issues," says Judy Brewer, director of the Web Accessibility Initiative at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "If companies are designing or putting their information on the Web internally or for the public, or doing e-commerce, then it's suicide to make an inaccessible Web site. It's throwing away those customers."

Commercial Web sites that don't address accessibility issues could also face legal problems. In a 1996 opinion, the U.S. Department of Justice indicated that Web sites that sell goods fall under the same access guidelines as other public accommodations, as outlined in the Americans With Disabilities Act. To date, nobody has filed a lawsuit testing this opinion.

The Web Accessibility Initiative has been tackling accessibility issues for the past year and a half and is working on final drafts of guidelines for Web authors, browsers, and authoring tools. The gist of these guidelines, according to Brewer, is "redundancy." That means labeling every image, including image maps, scripts, and applets, and providing transcripts for audio and video files.

One way Web authors can determine whether their pages are accessible is with the Center for Applied Special Technologies' "Bobby." Available free as either a download or a Web service, Bobby scans a Web page to find out how friendly the page is to people with disabilities. If the page gets a good rating, it can display a Bobby-approved logo.

Unfortunately, vast numbers of sites simply don't make this effort. (And yes, we know that PC World Online also needs to do a better job.)