Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

The key strategy shaping WAI is international collaboration: WAI welcomes participation from people around the world. WAI, in collaboration with organisations around the world, pursues accessibility of the web through 5 primary activities:

1. ensuring that core technologies of the web support accessibility;
2. developing guidelines for web content, user agents, and authoring tools;
3. facilitating development of evaluation and repair tools for accessibility;
4. conducting education and outreach; and
5. coordinating with research and development (R & D) that can affect the future accessibility of the web.

Volunteers review, implement, and promote guidelines. They also collaborate in working groups to discuss issues such as guidelines and techniques for accessibility, and methods for managing and evaluating this attempt to equalise access to information and communication technology (ICT).

For instance, the process of crafting web accessibility guidelines, technical reports, and educational resources to help make the web accessible to people with disabilities involves efforts to ensure broad community input and encourage what the organisation terms "consensus development" ("Consensus is a core value of W3C. To promote consensus, the W3C process requires Chairs to ensure that groups consider all legitimate views and objections, and endeavor to resolve them, whether these views and objections are expressed by the active participants of the group or by others (e.g., another W3C group, a group in another organization, or the general public). Decisions MAY be made during meetings (face-to-face or distributed) as well as through email.") Through this process, WAI developed the following W3C Recommendations: "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: WCAG Overview, WCAG 1.0" (May 1999), "Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines: ATAG Overview, ATAG 1.0" (February 2000), and "User Agent Accessibility Guidelines: UAAG Overview, UAAG 1.0" (December 2002). Details about the milestones that a technical report goes through on its way to becoming a W3C Recommendation may be found by clicking here (e.g., "Working Drafts are published and announced specifically to ask for review and input from the community....WAI actively encourages broad participation from industry, disability organizations, accessibility researchers, government, and others interested in Web accessibility...")

A visit to the WAI website enables access to resources such as "Essential Components of Web Accessibility", 10 quick tips for those seeking to create accessible websites, and links to additional resources such as an WAI online overview and a web content accessibility and mobile web. One page on this website is a multi-page resource suite that outlines different approaches for evaluating Websites for accessibility.

Technology.

Organisers contend that "[t]he power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."

Continuing, WAI explains that, "[f]or those unfamiliar with accessibility issues pertaining to Web page design, consider that many users may be operating in contexts very different from your own:

• They may not be able to see, hear, move, or may not be able to process some types of information easily or at all.
• They may have difficulty reading or comprehending text.
• They may not have or be able to use a keyboard or mouse.
• They may have a text-only screen, a small screen, or a slow Internet connection.
• They may not speak or understand fluently the language in which the document is written.
• They may be in a situation where their eyes, ears, or hands are busy or interfered with (e.g., driving to work, working in a loud environment, etc.).
• They may have an early version of a browser, a different browser entirely, a voice browser, or a different operating system.

...While there are several situations to consider, each accessible design choice generally benefits several disability groups at once and the Web community as a whole. For example, by using style sheets to control font styles and eliminating the FONT element, HTML authors will have more control over their pages, make those pages more accessible to people with low vision, and by sharing the style sheets, will often shorten page download times for all users."