Universal Design for Web Applications

The Standards

Industry standards will help you meet the laws. Especially now that WCAG 2.0 has been updated to address technologies such as Ajax, conforming to WCAG 2.0 will put you ahead of the game.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

Most of the standards covered in this book are products of the W3C,^[9] in particular the WAI^[10] whose purpose is to “[work] with organizations around the world to develop strategies, guidelines, and resources to help make the Web accessible to people with disabilities.” The WAI wrote “Essential Components of Web Accessibility,” which you can find at http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/components.php, to explain how each of the components addressed by the separate guidelines is needed to make the Web accessible.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

Â	The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) documents explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities. Web “content” generally refers to the information in a Web page or Web application, including text, images, forms, sounds, and such.	Â
Â	--http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php

WCAG 1.0 was published as a W3C Recommendation in 1999. Since then it has been used as the basis for a variety of government and organizational policies around the world.

WCAG 2.0 has nearly emerged from the W3C process. At the time of this writing, its current status is “Proposed Recommendation.” Assuming that the W3C membership supports this draft, ...