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The federal government this morning published standards for government Web sites to be made accessible by people with disabilities. Federal sites must comply with the standards by June 21, 2001.
The Web access rules, issued by the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board, a little-known, independent federal agency, are part of a broader set of accessibility standards that apply to all IT procured or developed by the government.
The standards cover controls, keyboards, application software, operating systems, Web-based information or applications, telecommunications functions, multimedia products, information kiosks and transaction machines.
The rules require that "individuals with disabilities, who are members of the public seeking information or services from a federal agency, have access to and use of information and data that is comparable to that provided to the public who are not individuals with disabilities, unless an undue burden would be imposed on the agency."
For example, Web pages that use pictures, colors and the like as navigational aids for sighted users must also make text equivalents available as aids to blind users who may use text-to-speech devices to navigate the Internet. The rules say, "This provision requires that when an image indicates a navigational action such as 'move to the next screen' or 'go back to the top of the page,' the image must be accompanied by actual text that states the purpose of the image."
The mandatory federal rules for Web access are a subset of broader guidelines for Web accessibility published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
"All the things required are good Web design anyway," said Gregg Vanderheiden, director of the Trace Research and Development Center at the College of Engineering of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "And what you do to make the things accessible are the things you do to make them usable with mobile technologies."
As a result, the W3C guidelines offer good and consistent advice to Web site developers who want to make their pages accessible to both disabled and mobile users, he said.
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