RECOMMENDATION

Influence Technology Development

One factor that has greatly challenged the creators of new technologies has been unavailability of information about how to make these technologies accessible. Very few professionals have, or should be expected to have, the credentials to have sufficient awareness about the accessibility implications of their designs. Most do not even have access to people with the appropriate credentials, even if they are motivated to attend to the issue. As the pace of technological innovation continues to accelerate, meanwhile, it will become increasingly difficult for those who do have accessibility credentials to be “at the table” at all the place they need to. Therefore, it will be crucial that, as a community, we make available effective guidelines for the design of technologies themselves to incorporate accessibility support. These guidelines need to be understandable by a technology developer who is pressed for time, and comprehensive enough that, if followed, there is acceptable assurance that real accessibility will result.

Xml Accessibility Guidelines

Any early example of this type of specification is the XML Accessibility Guidelines from the World Wide Web Consortium. Although only a draft, and at this time both dated and incomplete, this document provides basic principles for ensuring that accessibility principles are built into XML-based languages. As a community, we need to reinvigorate this or a similar
specification and ensure it is applicable to the various kinds of technologies that we can foresee being developed.

Accessible Rich Internet Applications

The development of new technologies requires, however, more than simple vigilance to ensure accessibility features are included. New technologies bring new paradigms, sometimes in quite
unexpected ways. While the accessibility problems and solutions of currently deployed technologies are reasonably well understood, new technologies can introduce new kinds of
challenges for accessibility. The optimal solutions to these challenges might not be immediately apparent and will require experience and research to develop. The development of such solutions, in turn, is required to implement the necessary features in the technologies. Thus, it is all the more critical that accessibility advocates be involved in an active way at the earliest
stages of any technology development. As part of the solution to Web 2.0, the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative is developing a suite of specifications for Accessible Rich Internet Applications. Described in the Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications, it describes the technologies to map controls, AJAX live regions and events to accessibility APIs, including custom controls used for Rich Internet Applications as well as techniques to mark common Web
Structures as menus, primary content, and secondary content. The technical specifications are provided in two parts: Roles for Accessible Rich Internet Applications and States and
Properties Module for Accessible Rich Internet Applications. WAI-ARIA Roles identifies the types of widgets that are recognized by accessibility products, and provides an ontology of
roles for these that can be attached to content. WAI-ARIA States and Properties allows authors to declare important properties of an element that affect and describe interaction.
The Accessible Rich Internet Applications suite is specifically designed as a bridge between established and emerging technologies. HTML does not provide all the semantic features
needed for accessibility, and the new forms of interaction possible with Dynamic HTML and AJAX push the semantic requirements further. Therefore, WAI-ARIA catalogs the semantics currently understood by assistive technologies and provides a mechanism to attach those semantics to Web content. The mechanism to attach WAI-ARIA to Web content uses standardized technologies of namespaces and XHTML modularization, and the ontology of roles is implemented in Web Ontology Language. Since HTML does not support these features, a technique is provided to use the “class” attribute to provide WAI-ARIA information. This is similar to how micro formats are used, though distinct as well because it provides multiple values and provides a mechanism to use other values of the attribute for other purposes. Use of these standard technologies, many of which are core enabling technologies for the Semantic Web, is expected to ensure forwards compatibility. However, it may prove that the ontology of roles and states will be directly adopted by future technologies and the need to provide WAI-ARIA support as a semi-separate effort will diminish.

Research

The WAI-ARIA suite is the result of active research by participants in the Web Accessibility Initiative working groups. To keep pace with technological change, ongoing research is very
important. Research is needed to discover problems in new technologies early, and then to develop effective methods of resolving those problems for people with disabilities. This will
require creativity and technical innovation. When developing solutions, approaches that yield an optimal cost/benefit balance must be high priority.

Work With Community

One trend that has provided important new opportunities for accessibility has been the rise of community developed tools, particularly user agents. Accessibility advocates unable to obtain
rapid results in the implementation of accessibility features in mainstream products have been able to contribute accessibility features to community developed products such as Firefox. This
has had the direct benefit of making needed accessibility features available sooner. It has also provided a forum for accessibility advocates to have a voice in the future of Web technology. This in turn has created real market pressure that has led to an acceleration in the implementation of accessibility features in mainstream products. Note that mainstream technologies are not
likely to lose their market dominance by this trend, but the ability for people with specialized needs, including people with disabilities, to develop their own solutions has led to noticeable
increases in attention from all technology developers. In support of all this growth of the field, there will be a need for increased professionalization of Web accessibility. In particular,
Accessibility-oriented design expertise will be in demand, as well as accessibility evaluation expertise. Designers must be able to create template designs, reusable widgets, and most large organizations will engage staff or consultants as part of the normal process of creating Web sites. Evaluators will verify to third parties that sites created by these designers do in fact meet the needs of people with disabilities. Finally, advocacy will continue to play a vital role in maintaining this trajectory of the field of accessibility. Without the work of advocates,
The awareness that currently exists will fade again. Advocacy has brought about the research into solutions for accessibility problems, and created a social and legal environment in which organizations developing Web technologies and Web sites pay attention to the issues. This is a trend which we must work actively to maintain.