What is Web Accessibility Initiative?

World Wide Web Consortium Website Access Law - An Introduction

Apr 6, 2009

The primary purpose of Web Accessibility Initiative is to evolve methodologies and guidelines to provide easy access to websites for all including the physically disabled

Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is affiliated with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its aim is to facilitate greater accessibility of the web for organizations across the world.

W3C, which today has more than five hundred member organizations, was created in 1994 to develop common protocols for the smooth functioning of the World Wide Web. It may be said that the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) specifications are two of the most notable achievements of W3C.

Basic Pursuit of WAI

It is a fact that the Web is becoming an increasingly sought-after resource in many areas like education, employment, government, information, health care, public utilities, entertainment and lot more. It has therefore become imperative that the Web is made easily accessible to provide equal opportunity to all.

WAI is principally concerned with a few functional areas and its primary activities are to make sure that web technologies support accessibility, evolve suitable guidelines for easy accessibility, devise tools to evaluate web accessibility, promote education and outreach, and continue research.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

WAI published the first version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines called WCAG1 in 1999 for building accessible websites. The WCAG1 consists of 65 different checkpoints broadly categorized into three conformance levels:

Standard A - Websites must comply with all the priority one checkpoints to achieve standard A.

Standard AA–Websites must comply with all of the priority one and two checkpoints to achieve standard AA.

Standard AAA- Websites must comply with all priority one, two and three checkpoints to achieve standard AAA.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Version 2 (WCAG2) is currently being written by the WAI and the proposed guidelines group checkpoints from four different perspectives – Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust Content.

Persons with Disabilities

The most laudable aim of (WAI) is to evolve strategies and guidelines to make the Web accessible to disabled persons, elderly and infirm persons so that these people can also comfortably peruse, navigate, and interact with the Web and even contribute to the Web.

WAI recognizes all physical disabilities like lack of eyesight, hearing deficiency, speech disorders, old age infirmities and neurological problems and works to provide easy web access to all of them.

The WAI is opening up in a big way uniform access to all people to print, audio, and visual media through Web technologies. Much of the success of WAI will rest with Web designers and web software developers.

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