W3C Adopts Web-Editing Tool Standards

If manufacturers comply with guidelines established today by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international Web-standards advisory organization, it may soon get a lot easier for handicapped people to interact with the Web.

"The Web is not just a place to go to read stuff," said Ian Jacobs, a W3C technical editor who co-edited the W3C recommendation report. "People are supposed to collaborate and participate in it, and everyone should be able to author."

The W3C today released its "Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, 1.0," the second of a series of three guidelines the organization plans to issue to make it easier for disabled people to access and create Web content. The recommendation issued today affects Web editing and content management tools like Microsoft's Front Page, Allaire Corp.'s HomeSite, and Sausage Software's HotDog Professional, among many other programs.

"The authoring tool guidelines will actually make life much easier for content providers," Jacobs said. "If we can get authoring tools that produce valid mark-up and accessible content, then they won't have anything special to do. It will be a natural part of producing Web content."

People with handicaps like blindness, deafness, or other physical disabilities, find it tough to take advantage of the Web as an interactive medium, either as site creators or as participants in interactive forums like chat rooms, Jacobs said. The W3C is in the middle of what will be a three-year process to develop guidelines facilitating the participation of the disabled online.

In May, W3C's accessibility advisory team, a consortium of Internet industry leaders and handicap-issue experts, published recommendations about handicapped-accessible content. The latest report pertains strictly to editing tools. By next April, Jacobs said, the team is set to deliver recommendations on so-called "user agents," software like Real Player G2 and Windows Media that present various forms of content, but are not embedded in Web browsers.

Much of what the newest report seeks to standardize are very simple fixes to authoring tools. Jacobs pointed to the example of America Online's e-mail client, which shouts out the ubiquitous, "You've got mail," whenever a subscriber has e-mail to download. The program generating the information gives the same information in text form. HTML (hypertext markup language) authoring tools can be modified to make it simple to create redundancies that assist the disabled, Jacobs said.

"That's all we're saying," Jacobs said. "When you have output like that, it has to be available in different modes - in sound and text and visually. Redundancy of output is one of the principals to making a successful tool."

Another standard is simply a case of solid HTML coding. If an image is used on a screen, a blind person cannot see it. But if the author writes in a description as an ALT tag in the original coding, the user will either be able to read it, or special tools used by the blind that translate text to sound will be able to read it to them. Editing systems can be modified to simplify the insertion of ALT tags, or to sound a discrete alarm if one was forgotten, Jacob said.

Some publishers have expressed concerns in the past that the standards are a potential imposition. If a news site, for instance, runs a video clip, is it responsible for the time and expense of providing a text version of that too?

Jacobs said the guidelines are not so stringent, adding that much of what authoring tools can do to improve is simply a matter of making it easy to use the tools already at the disposal of disabled people, things like Braille writers and script readers.

"A lot of people mistakenly think you need a text-only secondary page for people who have difficulty accessing the Web," he said. "No, you want one page, and there are ways to make that page accessible. Content guidelines tell how to do that, the authoring guidelines say, 'Here's what you should do in order to make any author produce accessible content.'"

Jacobs added that the standards will not simply benefit the handicapped.

"One of the selling points that we often use is that if you do these things that we're talking about, actually, you'll make the Web better for a lot of people," Jacob said. Easy examples are cell phones or hand-held digital devices with wireless Net connections. The accessibility standards also promise to make content viewing or creation easier using those devices, he said.

The guidelines have no force of law, and the W3C is not an enforcement body. But Jacobs said that the signs are good that there will be substantial if not universal industry compliance.

"There are some software developers who are working hard to create compliant tools," Jacobs said. "It's a serious market advantage to them to claim conformance. I don't know how long it takes in product development cycles to get these built in, but they've been in development for a year; these guidelines are not new today to developers. Some of the developers have told us they are close, if not already compliant."

The W3C is an international industry consortium jointly operated by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, France's National Institute for Research in Computer Science, and Japan's Keio University.

The new standards are more fully described at the W3C site, at http://www.w3c.org .

Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com .