The federal government next week will deliver a proposal that will eventually force many Web sites to retool, making them more accessible to disabled users.
"Directly and indirectly, these new standards will have a wide impact on the Web community," said Jenifer Simpson, manager of technology initiatives for the President's Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities.
"These regulations will cover all the people from whom the government buys its information technology -- that's billions of dollars' worth of business," she said.
Browse Webmonkey's Web Accessibility Guide- - - - - -
Under the 1998 Workforce Investment Act, all Web sites operated by the government, or government Web sites contracted out to private companies, will be required to update their design, technology, and content to become more accessible.
Once finalized next year, the new rules aim to guarantee that disabled consumers will "have access to and use of information and data that is comparable to the access and use of information and data by such members of the public who are not individuals with disabilities."
Doug Wakefield, director of the Electronic Information Technology Access Advisory Committee, said the rules will not only apply to federal agencies and Web sites. He said the rules will apply to those products of companies in the private sector that are being purchased by the government.
"So, for example, if we were to buy a fax machine from a company, the machines would have to comply with section 508," said Wakefield. "If we hired a Web design company to design Web sites for us, the Web sites would have to comply with Section 508."
The US Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board -- the agency charged with creating and enforcing the new guidelines -- won't release its "proposed" regulations for compliance with Section 508 until next Wednesday.
But many believe that the government's rules with respect to Web sites will be derived from the latest guidelines of the Web Accessibility Initiative, announced this week by the World Wide Web Consortium.
The consortium guidelines specify that Web sites:
- Should provide text alternatives to graphics, audio, and images.
- Should not rely on HTML tables for layout and design, as is commonly the case on thousands of sites. Such tables may only be used for tabular data.
- Must be navigable without the use of a mouse or similar device.
Such guidelines are intended to allow more sites to support devices such as screen readers, which take code intended for a monitor and send it to a speech synthesizer or a refreshable Braille display. In that way, a user who can't read a Web site can hear it.
Specific HTML coding can also allow users who cannot use a mouse to reduce their input to a single key stroke.
"We want designers to change the way they're thinking, to incorporate the needs ... [of the disabled]," said Judy Brewer, director of the consortium's accessibility initiative.
But for some Web designers and technologists, the rules will come with a whole new set of problems.
"Of course, I believe that handicapped people should have full access to the Web," said Oz Lubling, a technologist at Web design and consulting firm Razorfish.
"But technology and new computer languages, like XML, are emerging so quickly now that a more useful approach would be to work with and adapt the new technology to enable the users, rather than restrict the old technology, which seems disabling," he said.
Lubling said that the cost of reverse-engineering existing Web sites could be prohibitive, and maybe even cause sites that can't afford the expense to shut down.
"The bottom line is that in general, designers are not going to be happy with any mandated restrictions," he said.
Kari Friedman, an engineer at the Web design firm Organic agrees that the cost of these changes could be exorbitant.
"I would suspect it would raise costs at least twice as much," Friedman said.
So will this have a chilling effect on Web design in the future? "I don't really think so," said Drue Miller, the creative director of Vivid Studios, a Web design company that already incorporates a lot of the WC3's recommended specifications.
"Of course, there will always be designers who want to be on the bleeding edge -- and thus, exclude 90 percent of the audience out there. Then there are those who want to be all-inclusive. Maybe this will bring about a kind of happier medium," Miller said.
Editor's Note: This story has been corrected. The original article incorrectly stated that Web sites operated by government contractors would be held to the pending rules. Further, the story misstated a W3C guideline concerning the use of multiple languages on one page. Wired News regrets the errors.
