1266 Accessibility Chapter 24 www.trainingpost.org/3-2-inst.htm This site presents a tutorial on the Gunning Fog Index. The Gunning Fog Index is a method of grading text according to its readability. laurence.canlearn.ca/English/learn/accessibility2001/neads/ index.shtml INDIE stands for Integrated Network of Disability Information and Education. This site is home to a search engine that helps users find information on disabilities. www.wgbh.org/wgbh/pages/ncam/accesslinks.html This page provides links to other accessibility pages across the Web. SUMMARY Enabling a Web site to meet the needs of individuals with disabilities is an important issue. Enabling a Web site to meet the needs of individuals with disabilities is an issue relevant to all business owners. Technologies such as voice activation, visual enhancers and auditory aids enable individuals with disabilities to have access to the web and software applications. In 1997, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) launched the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The WAI is an attempt to make the Web more accessible; its mission is described at www.w3.org/WAI. Accessibility refers to the level of usability of an application or Web site for people with disabilities. Total accessibility is difficult to achieve because there are many different disabilities, language barriers, and hardware and software inconsistencies. The majority of Web sites are considered to be either partially or totally inaccessible to people with visual, learning or mobility impairments. The WAI published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, which assign accessibility priorities to a three-tier structure of checkpoints. The WAI currently is working on a draft of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. One important WAI requirement is to ensure that every image, movie and sound on a Web site is accompanied by a description that clearly defines the item s purpose; the description is called an tag. Specialized user agents, such as screen readers (programs that allow users to hear what is being displayed on their screen) and braille displays (devices that receive data from screen-reading software and output the data as braille), allow people with visual impairments to access text-based information that normally is displayed on the screen. Using a screen reader to navigate a Web site can be time consuming and frustrating, because screen readers are unable to interpret pictures and other graphical content that do not have alternative text. Including links at the top of each Web page provides easy access to the page s main content. Web pages with large amounts of multimedia content are difficult for user agents to interpret unless they are designed properly. Images, movies and most non-XHTML objects cannot be read by screen readers. Misused heading tags (

) also present challenges to some Web users particularly those who cannot use a mouse. Web designers should avoid misuse of the alt attribute; it is intended to provide a short description of an XHTML object that might not load properly on all user agents.
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