Generally speaking, people with disabilities require assistive or adaptive devices to assist them in rendering or viewing a document. Those in the disability technology field refer to these as "access systems." For example:
Access systems for people with disabilities include (but are not limited to): screen magnifiers, refreshable braille displays, screen readers, synthetic speech, caption-ready monitors, or alternative keyboards. The important point here is that the designer of the information need not worry about producing several versions of specialized documents. Rather, the focus should be on designing the source document with a rich set of characteristics can be subsequently rendered or viewed by a wider audience.
To emphasize, this is not a new technology. Those involved in on-line publishing know that a source document can be coded using, for example, symbolic reference tags that are recognized by the document processor and then rendered to plain text, postscript, or browser-compatible output. The same pre- and post-processing capabilities can be refined to produce braille, large text, and synthetic-voice output documents. No doubt, with the advent of publishing mechanisms like HyTime and Digital Audio, natural language voice documents (NLVDs) are possible. Therefore, access is not only achieved for people with disabilities, but language barriers also diminish. Indeed with W3C and SGML consortium support for style sheets and link process definitions, the ability to produce accessible information for all people, disabled or not has never been greater. This is the essence of universal design.
Contact Robin Cover with corrections and updates, or to submit contributions to the ISUG online document database.
