In “Accessibility News: Web Accessibility in the Spotlight in India”, we talked about how web accessibility is a growing global issue.

Malaysia offers another example of this. The Malaysian Association for the Blind has announced plans to improve the user experience of all the nation’s web sites, to ensure that they are more usable for visually impaired visitors.

They plan to conduct consultative services and advise both government and private web developers on what they can do to better adhere to Web Accessibility Initiative standards.

A team of three certified trainers in web accessibility will shoulder this effort.

Surely, there is a lot of ground to cover in this lofty goal, particularly for a small team. We’ll have to watch over time how this initiative fares, and if the visually impaired in Malaysia gradually find their web offerings more and more usable.

Source Article:
Helping the blind get connected on The Star Online

Tags: blindness, MAB, malaysia, Malaysian Association for the Blind, Web Accessibility Initiative, World Wide Web Consortium

With a little research, you’ll find that the subject of web accessibility is a growing buzzword in the United States and Great Britain, in particular. How is it being regarded or dealt with elsewhere?

Apparently, the topic of making websites more accessible to the disabled is gaining some exposure in India.

As reported in the Deccan Herald in “Accessible websites could become a reality“, a non-government entity in Bangalore, India called the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) recently reported that a whopping 99% of government websites in that country fail to meet the W3C guidelines on web accessibility.

Interestingly, according to visually-impaired lawyer Kanchan Pamnani, many India-based web developers adhere to web accessibility standards in work they do for their international partners, but not for sites they build domestically.

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), feeling pressure because of the perception that India web developers aren’t taking the subject seriously, is making efforts now to tackle web accessibility. For starters, it is making its own web site accessible, then will urge its members to do the same.

It certainly seems as if web accessibility is gaining momentum all over the world. It will be interesting to follow NASSCOM‘s progress on this, particularly with growing pressure.

Tags: India, NASSCOM, National Association of Software and Services Companies, W3C, World Wide Web Consortium

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 have been in place since 1999. A fairly complex set of guidelines that outline how to make Web content accessibie to those with disabilities, they have by and large been the standard.

No matter how you slice it, 1999 is a long time ago, especially in the Web industry. For the past few years, a 2.0 has been in the works.

On December 11th, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 were made into a W3C Recommendation.

The 2.0 guidelines haven’t been without controversy. Noted accessibility voice Joe Clark, in 2006, posted a strong criticism in his “To Hell with WCAG 2” article at A List Apart. His criticisms were many, and even spawned a group called the WCAG Samurai, which offered their own addendums to WCAG 1.0.

I’m sure to be blogging a lot about 2.0 in future entries. I’ve been carefully studying the admittedly very intensive do’s and don’t that lie within it. Some experts feel WCAG 2 has come a long way since 2006 when it first went out as a proposal; others no doubt remain skeptical.

Regardless, the upgrade to Recommendation status means that we’ll be seeing a lot about WCAG 2 in the months to come.

Related Links:
A New Era for Web Accessibility: WCAG 2.0 is Finalized
Web Accessibility Initiative

Tags: Joe Clark, W3, WCAG, WCAG Samurai, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, World Wide Web Consortium