Designing the Web for People With Disabilities: Preface

By Mike Paciello. This article first appeared in the World Wide Web Journal Advancing HTML Style and Substance, (O'Reilly, 1997, pp. 173-182)

Recently, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), an international program designed to increase accessibility to the Web for people with disabilities. As a result, Web access for people with disabilities has gained tremendous exposure and has increased awareness about a market that once was considered insignificant and not profitable.

This column will:

Identify major problems in Web information and software design that deny access
Feature successful products that can be used by people with disabilities to access the Web
Provide valuable resources that assist developers in creating accessible interfaces for the future

Information access for people with disabilities is creating numerous opportunities and challenges within the Information Highway community. Additionally, as a result of the increasing paradigm shift by the publishing industry toward Internet and WWW-based document delivery systems, the importance of producing accessible information using electronic document mechanisms has increased immeasurably.

The primary focus of this paper involves the production of electronic documents for people with disabilities. However, the key principals involved in the design, production, and delivery of information apply regardless of the document medium.

The paper will attempt to:

Identify major problems in information and software design that deny access
Cite successful products that can be used by people with disabilities to access publications
Point to resources that assist developers in creating accessible products in the future

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