Information for People with Disabilities using the Web

The Americans with Disabilities Act was enacted in 1990 by Congress as an all encompassing federal civil rights act to give those with disabilities the same working privileges as all citizens (Title I). Since then, four other titles have been added, including public transportation, new construction, etc. The one we will focus on is Title III, the telecommunications act. This title was added on in 1995 as protection for those previously unable to use phones, for example, because of the lack of TTY service. However, a provision was included to make Title III all encompassing to any new or unforeseen technologies that might arise. This was squarely aimed at web sites, which were just beginning their rise in popularity at this time.

Currently, there are several pending suits in federal courts over web sites, that may or may not make it to the Supreme Court. However, it's not necessary to wait until it's federal case law to implement some forms of ADA accessibility. The W3C is currently setting standards that all web sites can follow for accessibility (W3C Accessibility Initiative, ), including meeting the demands of disabled people.

Unfortunately, if you travel to the W3C's site on how people with disabilities use the web (W3C- How People with Disabilities....), you'll feel its time to abandon the ship before it even gets in the water. Listed on this web site are numerous scenarios of disabled people and the challenges they face to use a web site. These include color blindness, deafness, blindness, dyslexia, repetitive-motion stress, etc.

This overwhelming montage of scenarios may seem frightening at first, but they have some very important relativity in the world of usability. Color blindness (which effects 1 in 12 Americans) can lead to misinterpretation, unless they are allowed to use their own support sheets. This is an invaluable tool for usability as well, because any browser that supports CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) will make use of this standard, allowing for quicker downloads and no missing parts. Deafness, obviously, requires captioned text of all audio. This function is also important to those not wishing to listen (or more aptly, attract attention to themselves with sound) to an audio clip, but wanting the information.