Web Accessibility Initiative: helping people with deficiencies use WWW

The usage of a PC for a man with disabilities is a very hard thing to do. But it is even harder to use the Web, as people with disabilities sometimes require non-standard devices or browsers, that ease the access to the web-sites from PCs and mobile devices as well.

The Web Accessibility Initiative are a group created by the World Wide Web Consortium in order to create recommendations, that include strategies, guidelines and resources, in order to ease the use of the Web accessible for everyone, especially for the people with disabilities. It’s activity started in 1997, with the support from the White House and the W3C consortium.

WAI is composed of several working groups and several Special interest groups, every group having its own focus. Working groups’ main obligation is to create technical reports, that can afterward become W3C recommendation. On the other hand, Special interest groups are responsible for producing the reports, but they cannot do any recommendations. The groups usually meet through conference calls weekly or once in two weeks. Also, they meet face to face one up to five times a year.

The most important groups of WAI are:
Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AUWG) – it develops guidelines, techniques and supporting resources for different HTML tools, starting with HTML editors to CMS systems. It published the Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and now works on the 2.0 version of the same document. It also published some documents about “Selecting and Using Authoring Tools for Web Accessibility”.

Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) – its purpose is to create materials used for training and education on the issues on Web Accessibility. The group provided us with a large range of documents on the WAI project

Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group (ERT WG) – it consists mainly of developers of tools used for evaluating web sites and researchers. They are working with technical specifications that would permit the evaluation and repair of the web sites

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG) – it is probably the most well-known groups in WAI, it being the creator of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It’s main purpose is to provide guidelines, techniques and other documents regarding accessibility of Web