Basically, there are two types of image maps: server-side and client-side. The most used type is client-side maps, as there are some implementation problems with the server-side image maps.

The client-side image maps are called so, because the browser, after it receives the image, must figure out how to handle the clicking on every different piece of  the image. If the user clicked on the page, the browser looks at the areas specified in the <area> tag. If the user clicked in a region pointed in the code, the browser opens the requested page.

Because the screen readers are unable to understand what is written on images, it is required to use the alt tags together with these image maps, so that a blind person that uses a screen reader would be able to hear where the link goes to, instead of the link itself which very often in incomprehensible for the simple person.

Another type of image-maps are the server-side image maps. The difference between the client-side and server-side image maps is that the server-side image is closed in the <a> tag, and contains the ismap boolean attribute. Because of the implementation, this kind of image map is not accessible for a disabled person. Pressing Enter on the image would simply give the output of pressing on the image on 0,0 coordinate, and therefore it doesn’t allow access for people that are unable to use the mouse.

Therefore, it is recommended to specify redundant text links next to server-side image maps, in order to allow access for the disabled people.

Sometimes, pages with AJAX can trigger a script that simply changes the way the page looks like or changes the contents of the page. For someone that is using a screen reader to navigate through it, it is very hard to understand that possibly a text is somewhere changed.

So, in order to make AJAX accessible, there are four steps: optimise the content, mark up content semantically XHTML, create a CSS presentation layer and finally create the behaviour DOM scripts.

AJAX is such a kind of tool, that in the hands of the experienced people, it may result in creation of bright and interesting pages for everyone. But even experienced designers are advised to use AJAX as sparingly as possible. But as AJAX is a very interesting technology, in time it is very possible that it will be used more and more for the creation of web pages.

This is caused by the fact that many AJAX scripts, in contradiction with the WCAG, are unable to work with the JavaScript turned off. Many browsers still do not support JavaScript and many users are turning JavaScript off basing on security reasons.

The people and communities that are concerned about the web accessibility of client-side scripting and in particular AJAX for the production of Rich Internet Applications are working on adapting screen readers for working with AJAX. Nowadays Steve Faulkner, member of Vision Australia and fonder member of the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium, together with The Paciello Group are working on creation of technologies that would enable the screen readers in future to understand the AJAX output.

But nowadays, if you are thinking about creating an accessible web-site, think three times before using AJAX in it.

While for a beginner this can be a too unclear answer. It is very important to stress out that XHTML is not a tool that beginners can use. There are some arguments that XHTML is a new step in the evolution of HTML, but this is yet a thing that is not so sure, despite the many advocates it has. If this is correct then it will be necessary to teach XHTML from the ground up. It is an interesting idea, but the actual teaching is mainly done in a text/html environment. And in these conditions attempting to teach XHTML is very complicated and makes the learner to entangle in the vast volume of information. The XHTML offers a lot of material for learning, and this not taking in consideration the issues of browser support. In this situation it gets clear that the learners in most cases simply are not prepared, and it is better to teach them HTML instead

XHTML has included all the XML handling requirements and it is not only a HTML 4 in XML syntax. Also many suppositions concerning the possibility to use XHTML as text/html and after change it to XML with an improved browser support have no significant evidence to demonstrate that XHTML evolutes in a text/html environment will not make the transition to XML.

Many internet resources which offer tag-soup pages contain extremely complicated information for the beginner, and don’t touch upon the basics that the visitor has to know. This is why many beginners that learned XHTML under HTML, will not understand the elementary aspects of XHTML.

Also the accessible web sites make the web content accessible for those who use new mobile and hand held technologies like handheld PDA, mobile phone, voice browser. Also these improvements will assist those who work in unfavourable environments for example in a room with no light, in spaces with a big noise pollution etc. Another plus for web accessible content is the simplicity of search.

The pluses of this technology can be shown in the case of a visual impaired user of internet. These persons usually use screen readers, to access text information, while the graphics and images are not accessed. The Web creators solved a part of this problem attaching screen-readable alternative text to graphics and links, organizing the text in a logical reading order. This technology can also benefit the users that have low bandwidth connections using text-based browsers to surf more quickly. Also PDA users can disable graphics for quicker page downloads. And with increasing the content availability as text or alt-text a more effective search is possible.

The corporate vice president of the search and advertising division at Microsoft, Satya Nadella informed in a public interview about the Microsoft perspectives and plans for the improvement of the search market, in along perspective. This interview was offered in a short time after the launch of the new Microsoft features in the Live Search site on the 26 of September 2007.

The first question was concerning how much search traffic comes from the search embedded in other Microsoft web properties, in comparison with the users that access directly the main Live.com search page. The Vice president answered that the MSN search bar creates a lot of traffic, also many users, install the MSN toolbar and select MSN as default provider for their browsers. Also she mentioned that these three sources constitute the top of the Microsoft search traffic.

Also the interviewer asked if one percent of the Microsoft traffic comes from persons which are typing in the Live.com web address. She confirmed the probability of this fact and also informed that Microsoft did not marketed seriously Live.com. The strategy of Microsoft was that Live search to power MSN. The Microsoft official mentioned that this is the place where better gains can be acquired while offering a better search experience and stimulating the consumers and customers to do more searches on MSN.

Also Satya Nadella mentioned that the unasked question in this case is what kind of hoops Microsoft will ask the web designers to overlook in case if their engine catches on. Also Google had the same problems when it became a popular search engine. And it is interesting what paid help or keywords the Google Company will use. The official ended it’s interview with the question concerning if Google will use the same tactics as earlier to overcome this difficulties.

Taking in consideration the development and support for the 2.0 specification, SMIL has the perspective of becoming a standard approach for the developers which work with any type of multimedia asset control.

SMIL was developed since March 1997, starting with the establishment of a working team on synchronized multimedia by the World Wide Web Consortium. It was created as an XML-based language that allows the creation of interactive multimedia presentations, without the use of multimedia tools. It gives the developers the possibility of describing the timing of presentations, associating hyperlinks with media and defining the layout of the presentation onscreen.

The 2.0 version of SMIL was released in August 2001. Afterwards this basic concept many independently-crafted SMIL authoring platforms were available. The World Wide Web Consortium designates two basic design aims for SMIL 2.0. First of all to define continuously an XML-based language that will allow the web-designers to make interactive multimedia presentations. And secondly is the possibility of re-using SMIL 2.0 semantics and syntax for other XML-based languages.

The SMIL format has a large vendor support. One of the most significant vendors is Real Networks. The RealOne player of this company supports playback of SMIL. Also Real Networks released its own version of XML/SMIL authoring tool, SMILGen in the autumn of 2001. Also the Microsoft Company added to Internet Explorer starting with the version 5.0 a subset of SMIL support to web. Adobe in its visual authoring software for Web designers GoLive Studio offers SMIL and also QuickTime editors.

The perspectives of SMIL are very promising because of the large use of MMS messaging instead of simple SMS. This could make SMIL one of the most used services in the future of mobile communications.

The HTML standard was initially projected as a structural markup language. The latter improvements made with the help of such companies as Netscape and Microsoft, have improved HTML adding new markup tags, in order to influence the presentation, with “BLINK” as an example.

Using the Style Sheets technology HTML format returns to its primary aim, also allowing the authors to change and work with the presentation. CSS1 is the first official specification of Style Sheets for HTML standard. This specification is a draft project included in the W3C process, allowing to the authors to control easily features as color, font, margins and others.

HTML offers many advantages in this sense. The use of a structured language instead of a presentational language is an advantage of HTML. This structure makes it relatively simple to create an Aural Browser with the help of a speech synthesizer, which reads the documents to the user. Such an aural browser has the superiority of reading the emphasized text with a greater emphasis making the quality of the reading much better. This technology will surely help the persons with vision defects but also it can assist people that can not use a video screen, for example while driving, walking, and other.

The perspectives of the technology are great, and some projects exist to extend CSS for including speech and other aural specifications. This will increase the possibility of working with documents, and other tasks that earlier were not possible for a visually impaired person. T.V. Raman is one of the initiators of the project, he is also a blind person, and he also effectuated researches on the issue of voice synthesis and automatic reading of LaTeX documents in his PHD. The thesis of T.V. Raman analyzed the issue of web surfing with the help of Emacs W3 web browser connected to a speech-synthesizer which is testing a beta version of the specification that will improve the internet access for the visually impaired.

• As forms are older than XML, the integration between them is very poor
• Every common tasks made on form’s information requires a great amount of scripting
• Forms run well only on desktop browsers, depending on the device it is being run on
• They have great limits in accessibility
• They are hard to learn, because of the blending of purpose and presentation.

A new W3C standard, the XForms, come to substitute the old forms, in order to add some additional features and ease the work for the developers. The goals that XForms tend to accomplish are:

• Improvement on XML and XML Schema integration
• Simplification of common-related tasks, so that less scripting would be required
• Device-independence, so that it could work on all types of computers
• Universal Accessibility
• Separation of purpose from presentation.

XForms is an XML technology, that is very close to XSLT processing. They both use the instance data that is based on XML and defined in terms of XPath’s internal tree representation. Of course, there are some differences between them. XSLT is usually defined in terms of three trees, resultant from parsing XML documents. But XForms combines the input and output trees, so often in the diagrams you would see it as the representation of only two trees, resulted from parsing XML documents. The flow of data in XForms is in the following way:

1. The information that comes either inline, or from an XML document is parsed into memory.
2. The information from the instance data is being processed. That involved the interaction with the user and recording of the received data.
3. The submitted data is processed, being transformed usually into XML, and sent to the server

The site is a set of practices that are used on the University’s site to provide support  for everybody on the university’s site. Now it’s the place where all the Internet meets to learn on making a website accessible. The HTML/XHTML Best Practices Site was made with the following purposes in mind: it must benefit the people with disabilities in the first place, bring benefits to web developers and all other users, and in the end, encourage the creation of sites that would support automated testing.

The old approach of making a site “accessible” is the repair approach, where the web-designer simply brings the site to the requirements of WCAG or of the Section 508. While this makes the site more usable from the technical part, anyway it doesn’t help a lot. The Best Practices on the other way, focuses on creating a functionally easier environment, that improve the experience of all the users, not only the ones with disabilities. The site is mentoring the so-called “user-centered” design approach, that are inspired by the needs of people with disabilities, but also allow other users to get additional control when accessing the web resources.

The user-centered approach is centered around making assumptions not about what technologies should be used when accessing a web-resource, but more options can be implemented to use a larger range of technologies, so that the information could be restyled for the needs of the developer. In such a way, basing on the fact that all the users benefit from this design approach, developers can test to see if their resources are conforming to the user-centered design.

As an answer to this question appeared the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines document, first version 1.0, and more recently the 2.0 version. It covers a great range of recommendations that would enable the Internet to be much more accessible. After following these recommendations from W3C, a wider range of people with disabilities, such as blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, cognitive limitations, photo-sensitivity, learning disabilities and combinations of these. Also, these guidelines would help you make the content of your site more sensitive to users in general. The most important thing that was done by the WCAG developers was that they were able to define a notion of the word “accessible”, that can be applied to the online technologies. They made a great accent on the usability, regardless of the deficiency one has.

The recommendations included in WCAG 2.0 are not technically specific, meaning that they could be implemented on different platform and operating systems. WCAG 2.0 is being extended and supported in a series of additional document, Understanding WCAG 2.0 and Techniques for WCAG 2.0. These documents do not have a formal status and help the user or developer to better understand the requirements of implementation of WCAG 2.0.

WCAG 2.0 succeeds the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, which were published as a W3C recommendation in May 1999. Now, it is possible to conform to either 1.0 version of the document, or to 2.0 (or even both), but the W3c recommends the usage of 2.0 version for the new, updated content.

By implementing the new WCAG specifications on every site, we can open a new era of opening the Internet for all the categories of people, regardless of their disabilities.