Accessibility Toolkit

The importance of open standards on accessibility

Frances W. West CNET News.com

Published: 03 Aug 2005 12:50 BST

The Internet has no country borders — neither should the information technology that enables it to be accessible to all people.

At a time when travel and currency barriers continue to fall in Europe, several countries want to create new boundaries related to the Web. These nations want to establish a label or mark that would specify Web pages or products that are "accessible" to people with disabilities. However, such standards could differ from existing standards.

The reality is that if you are blind and use a "screen reader" to read Internet content out loud as you surf the Web, the product should be able to read sites from the US government as easily as it reads ones posted by the government of Sweden. Agreement among governments on their policies for accessibility would accomplish this goal.

Accessibility is in everyone's interest.

The World Health Organisation estimates that between 750 million and 1 billion of the world's 6 billion people have a speech, vision, mobility, hearing or cognitive impairment.

In the US alone, more than 54 million people have disabilities. The numbers are increasing as 76 million baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964 get older. In other developed countries, including Italy, Spain and Japan, 45 percent of the population will be over the age of 60 by the year 2040, according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

People are living longer, and although health care is continually improving, it's almost impossible to eliminate the incidence of disabilities acquired as part of the normal aging process.

Powerful demographic and social trends are fuelling the need for information technology accessibility worldwide, but we are at a point where individual governments may fragment their efforts.

The US marked a milestone in IT accessibility in 1998, when it amended Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Section 508 requires all information technology purchased by the federal government to be accessible. Federal government Web sites and Web-based activity must be accessible as well. The law, coupled with its amendment and its technical specifications, has had global reach as many countries around the world look to Section 508 as a blueprint for their own Web accessibility guidelines.

Since Section 508 took effect, the entire tech industry has invested significant technical and human resources in bringing products and services into compliance, in many cases, by incorporating accessibility requirements in the concept phase of product development.