SUN MICROSYSTEMS TALKS ABOUT WEB ACCESSIBILITY

From: Brian Buhrow (buhrow@cats.ucsc.edu)
Date: Fri Aug 14 1998 - 08:44:54 PDT


        Hello folks. I thought you might find the following article
interesting. To allow those of you who want to see it on the web, I have
included the URL. This isn't news as much as it is nice to see this kind
of thing on the front page of corporate web sites.Note that this was on the
front page of Sun's web site in early July.

   Linkname: New Technologies Open the Web to Everyone
        URL:
          http://www.sun.com/980629/enable/;$sessionid$NNCYNXQAAYO1BAMW0J
          ZE5YUBS1JHEUDO
    Charset: iso-8859-1
       size: 310 lines
          

                                      
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 JavaTM 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."
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