ASD Web Design Guidelines

Part 2: Accessibility

Accessibility is currently a big issue for web developers. In a nutshell, it means making accommodations for people who are vision impaired or blind, people who are hearing impaired or deaf, and people with motor impairments. It's important to ASD's web presence in two ways.

First and foremost, we are a publicly-funded institution and it's our responsibility to make sure that if somebody comes looking for information, that information is available, no matter what kind of computer or browser the user has. We want people to use our web site, so it just makes sense to make sure that anyone can.

Additionally, there are some possible legal issues. As of August of 2000, all federal government web sites were required to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. How does that relate to the ASD? Well, let's look at the Childrens Internet Protection Act (Senate Bill 97) as a possible example. Introduced in 1999, S. 97 would require any school district or public library that gets discounted Internet access from the government to filter Internet content or lose their discounted access. (There is some debate about further results, but one common opinion is that those institutions that do not comply with the new law would be required to reimburse the government for past years of discounted access.) Would the government try something similar to make all federally funded sites accessible? Maybe. There isn't really anyway of knowing, but it can't hurt to prepare, can it?

[As a side note, S. 97 is currently on the Congressional calendar awaiting action. That action could be debate or a vote. We'll probably see some movement on it after the elections in November.]

The links below give some insight into making pages accessible.

I strongly recommend that you take some time to read this information, especially if you already have a site up or if you are getting ready to build a site for the first time.

Bobby
http://www.cast.org/bobby/
Bobby is a program set up by the Center for Applied Special Technology. They have a web page validator that will tell you what kind of accessibility problems your page may have. You can use it on their web site or download a stand-alone version. They also have lots of good information about building accessible pages.

Web Accessibility Initiative
http://www.w3.org/wai/
A project of the World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body for the web. Pretty dense reading, but this group's recommendations will probably set the tone for any legal standardization of web accessibility.

Accessibility -- More than the Right Thing to Do
http://www.evolt.org/article/Accessibility_more_than_the_right_thing_to_do/4090/381/index.html
A very well-written piece that covers basics of the law and the changes you might need to make to existing sites and even provides a handy checklist.

Accessibility -- The Clock is Ticking
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/ticking/
Another article that covers some of the legal issues, but also addresses accessibility issues in general. From A List Apart.