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| accessibility guide intro | legislation | standards | studies |
This part of the Accessibility guide considers emerging global standards and tools for determining whether your site is up to scratch.
An appropriate starting point is the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the W3 Consortium. WAI has published detailed Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), describing what makes a site accessible for people with disabilities. The Guidelines are supported by a range of documents on the W3C site, in particular the Techniques for Web Content Accessibility (Tech) that explains how to implement the guidelines and a fact sheet answering commonly asked questions. There's also an online training package. The guidelines are complemented by separate Authoring Tool Guidelines (ATAG), aimed at those developing products used in building sites. The Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines (TEI) are also online. TEI is an international project to develop guidelines for the encoding of textual material using SGML for research purposes.
The Commonwealth government's AusInfo has released detailed electronic publishing guidelines for public sector agencies. Those guidelines include some discussion of accessibility issues and standards. The NSW government has published a specific standards document. IBM has published Web Accessibility Guidelines (WAC), including a checklist. The provocative Wasp at The Web Standards Project (a site designer/developer coalition "Fighting for Standards in our Browsers") considers standards issues from a more market-oriented perspective than much of the WAI documentation. The Web Access Disability Action Plan (WADAP) being developed by the Australian Internet Industry Association (IIA) and the Australian Interactive Multimedia Industry Association aims to provide all online businesses with a framework for implementing accessible site design.
The ACM's Human-Computer Interaction Bibliography (HCIB) is exhaustive. It includes extensive links to newsgroups, guidelines, research reports and other accessibility resources. The US-based WebAble is an important resource, offering electronic access to standards, guidelines and research material. Robert Davison's guidelines on E-Publishing for Developing Countries is applicable to remote Australia. We've pointed to other bibliographies in our design guide and in the next part of this guide.
The WCAG site points to a wide range of evaluation tools that are meant to quickly identify some accessibility problems on sites. Several of the tools include some automated checking. They do not automatically check everything, but offer guidance on areas that need to be examined by people rather than machines. The major tool is BOBBY, a free online service from the US Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST). Bobby analyses web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities: you simply enter the URL of the page that you want Bobby to examine and click Submit, before viewing a report indicating any accessibility and/or browser compatibility errors found on the page. In addition to the checklists noted above, we recommend the Canadian Public Service Commission's Accessibility Self-Evaluation Test (PSC).
Adobe now offers an email service for conversion of PDF documents to text or HTML. Adobe has also released a white paper on Optimising Adobe PDF Files for Accessibility.
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W3C standards and tools