Designing the Web for People With Disabilities. Identifying Key Issues: Production and Delivery

Document Production

The accessibility issues related to the production of a document primarily involve two things:

Authoring tools that are themselves accessible and also enforce accessible design tags, semantics, and protocols.
The ability of the processor to receive a single source document and build accessible or alternative outputs.

For example, the IBM Bookmanager can build documents for the blind to use with their screen readers and voice synthesizers. This is because IBM Bookmanager supports the ICADD (International Committee for Accessible Document Design) DTD which was designed to produce accessible documents for the print impaired.

Documents produced for the World Wide Web are gradually becoming more accessible and require less "massaging" by a post processor or other intermediary actions because some web browsers contain access features that enhance the readability of a document to persons with disabilities.

Document Delivery

In this case, document delivery refers to the ability of an on-line viewer or browser to adequately display a document. Most browsers or viewers were created for temporarily able bodied persons. They do not contain accessible features or controls that make it easier for people with disabilities to use. Additionally, they are rarely designed to allow assistive product manufacturers to easily link their products to using software "hooks".

A classic example is pwWebSpeak (The Productivity Works, Inc.). This GUI browser was designed with synthetic speech and large text functionality built in. It also supports the HTML 2.0 specification which includes the ICADD SGML Document Access attributes.

Ensuring electronic document delivery through a browser could be significantly enhanced if developers included assistive preference options that allow a user to "turn on" captioning, descriptive video, sound cues, synthetic voice, keyboard mapping, screen magnification and other accessibility features.

As noted earlier in this paper, people with disabilities are not completely unable to read or view electronic documents. Several solutions exist which were designed to increase accessibility to information. Following are manufacturer supplied descriptions of each solution.

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