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Web Accessibility Initiative |
It isn’t really the "World Wide Web" unless everyone can use the documents published on it. This includes those who are vision-impaired, who must use screen reader software to "see" Web sites, or to access HTML Help. Providing pages they can use is obviously a good idea. A few years ago, it also became "the law" for the US government; as of June 21, 2001, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (actually passed in 1998) went into effect, requiring all vendors who want to continue selling to the US federal government to make their products fully accessible to the disabled. This does include information published on the Web. The main guide to this area is the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which spells out features to be used (and to be avoided) by designers and Web authors. Many of the guidelines are simply common sense, but some require added attributes in certain HTML (or XHTML) elements. For example, graphics must have "alt" attributes, and tables "summary" attributes, to provide a text description of their objects. Tables may require very complex markup to associate each body cell with the relevant header cells. This is an area almost totally ignored in the numerous books out on HTML; we’ve searched through many, many of them, and found only one that devoted even four pages to this topic (Ian Graham’s XHTML 1.0 Language and Design Sourcebook). Even the book nominally dedicated to accessibility (yes, only one exists, by Michael Paciello), glides over most markup issues, focussing on screen reader features instead. We’ve added a large set of features to Mif2Go aimed at supporting, and in many cases automating, the markup required to meet WAI guidelines. For tables, we provide single-setting generation of scope and id/headers attributes, which otherwise would take a lot of manual post-processing of the HTML. We provide several alternative methods of setting the text description attributes: in the Frame file as markers, or as marked text, or in the .ini as a setting for a specific object or an arbitrary group of objects. We make it easy to create accessible Web pages, no matter how complex your documents, or what your choice of coding practices may be. See our User’s Guide for the full description. | ||||
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