Consortium Releases New Guidelines for Web Accessibility

The World Wide Web Consortium, an organization devoted to improving the interoperability of the Web, has released a new version of its Web-accessibility guidelines. The guidelines are meant to help Web designers build sites that can be read and understood by people with disabilities as diverse as blindness, hearing impairments, physical impairments, and even cognitive disabilities like short-term memory impairment or seizure disorders.

The new version of the guidelines was developed with broad input from the Web-development community, said Judy Brewer, director of the Web Accessibility Initiative for the consortium, which is known as W3C. The first version of the guidelines has been widely used around the world, but sometimes with modifications.

“There are a lot of local versions — sometimes with subtle or major differences,” she said. Web developers following different versions of the guidelines would “get into problems where there are conflicting requirements.”

Source: Wired Campus/Chronicle of Higher Education

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 and is filed under Access to Information, Search News, Technology and Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.