A History of Web Accessibility

Roberto Scano offers a detailed and informative history of website accessibility: “The first web revolution happened on the 14th January 1997: HTML 3.2 was issued from a consortium called the W3C, a consortium not yet known to web developers. As written in the document’s introduction, HTML 3.2 is the W3C’s specification for HTML, developed in early 1996, together with vendors including IBM, Microsoft, Netscape Communications Corporation, Novell, SoftQuad, Spyglass, and Sun Microsystems. HTML 3.2 added widely deployed features such as tables, applets and text flow around images, while providing full backwards compatibility with the existing standard HTML 2.0. Ten years later, and this is all history, but in those early years were the first web developers: guys and students (especially inside universities, where the web was available before it was available to the general public) started to develop their first pages using built-in web browser editors. I remember the first version of popular browsers : NCSA Mosaic, then Netscape, then Internet Explorer, and I also remember how difficult it was to configure Winsock.

CSS 1.0 was also on the scene in 1997, but presentation was achieved with markup elements and attributes back in those days. Browsers were not as forgiving as they are today. Mosaic stopped rendering content on the first markup error. When HTML 3.2 was first introduced, the HTML Writers Guild (there has been an HTML Writers Guild since 1994), merged with IWA , and only had their plain text editors for creating and editing content when the first shareware / freeware application for developing HTML was issued.”

Please read the full article from Juicy Studio and be informed of the rich history behind this important movement in web standards.