Universal Access on the Web

Gary Perlman http://www.acm.org/~perlman/

The Web is everywhere, but can everyone access your service? This question will be addressed at a SIG session at CHI 99.

Some barriers to universal access:


Universal OCLC FirstSearch®

At OCLC, I am working on the next generation of the FirstSearch service, with some focus on creating a system that is highly accessible by being: The desire to design a maintainable system with these attributes has motivated me to:
  1. Learn more about these areas, which in turn led to the creation of most of the link pages available from the SIGCHI and SIGCAPH sites (now some of the most popular pages on those sites).
  2. Try to address all these concerns in a coordinated effort, which in turn led to the evolution of techniques for developing highly configurable systems.
Architecturally, the main feature is the separation of: The user interface is configured based on runtime attributes: Based on these, entities in the Display Styles are adjusted and pages are dynamically generated, with entities being substituted on the server side by SiteSearch.

Many promising technologies were avoided:


Accessibility Examples

Check out how Bobby runs on http://www.hcibib.org/ (there is an accessibility check link at the bottom of each page). But Bobby does not check for a lot of features supported by IE 4.0+ (and not at all by Netscape 4.5 :-().

At hcibib.org:

Click on Start Search to get to the search page Click on the ACM SIGCHI link in the upper right I'm not sure all of these are good ideas, but I like the opportunity to add a little bit of help to each item.

IE provides some support for the table section tags (better in IE 5.0 than 4.0). Some features do not work as advertised in my O'Reilly HTML book, but there are usually workarounds.

The features that work well on IE (Netscape supports none of these, but at least it ignores them):

I've seen no support for the scope tags in tables (I had hoped to see a big leap in IE 5.0 accessibility support, but I've only seen minor fixes).

Caveat: A screen reader may not use any of these features. You need to actually try it, and may need to write scripts for the application to work with a particular screen reader.

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