User:Selahattinutus/sandbox

Two different studies, one of which covered European Union - EU countries based on public websites, the second covered only UK based on public websites, showing the web accessibility which was not used properly to make the public services available to all people.

An article published in March 2006 on Guardian (Guardian News, http://society.guardian.co.uk/e-public/story/0,,1741321,00.html, retrieved  on 21 September 2007) shows that these two studies with detailed percentages of how the accessibility issues should appear on the public websites.

This essay focuses on the website accessibility and usability issues with possible solutions.

Website accessibility
Web accessibility should be analysed in different perspectives. The accessibility of the web should be considered for even commercial purpose or aiming public service for all people with disabilities.

On the other hand, in the meaning of e-commerce, the web should be defined as a big commercial market where all people with disabilities have right to see and buy things. Therefore market holders should be able to identify their marketing spots from a wide point of view.

Web accessibility does not only cover people who have physical disabilities. It also covers several areas that need to be considered. Web accessibility issues might be caused by;

•	Technical weaknesses, such as coding (e.g. XHTML, CSS are recommended) •	Web developers •	The software used to develop websites •	User agents or web browser compatibility issues •	End users whether they have disability

Disabilities can classified as“... all disabilities that affect access to the Web, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities” (WAI official website, http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/accessibility.php, Retrieved  on 21 September 2007).

The Disability Discrimination Act 1995, which was actually revised and expanded in 2005 also describes that all sectors where the disable people have rights to act in.

The equal opportunity given to all people with disabilities by the government explains the meaning of a disable person is that “… a person has a disability for the purposes of this Act if he has a physical or mental impairment which has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on his ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities” (Office of Public Sector Information, Disability Discrimination Act 1995, http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1995/ukpga_19950050_en_2#pt1-l1g1, Retrieved  on 22 September 2007).  2.1.	Why Web Accessibility is Important

In the current ages, the most important part of our life is the web is argued. The web allows people to do anything they need such as in education, in government and health services and so on. In order to have an equal opportunity, this crucial service, the web, should be accessible by all people with disabilities. “The usability of your site is of critical importance to the success of the business channel …” (WebXM, http://www.watchfire.com/products/webxm/siteusability.aspx, retrieved on 24 September 2007) explains its importance.

In case of serving this essential facility to all, it is good to remember that it helps people to act dynamically in the public, which especially assists to disable people. (WAI website, http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/accessibility.php, retrieved  on 21 September 2007)

The meaning of the web accessibility does not only stand for the accessibility of the disable people.

It means more than that such as a person tries to search something on a website which does not provide a person’s own language, so it means that this website is not even accessible to all people.

Another point of that is the end user. Each an every user obviously has a different computer, different operating systems and different web browsers to surf on the web. Therefore, while some people use the latest version of a web browser, others might even use older one. This might cause some series issues such as security holes on the web. As a good sample of public service website, Figure -1 illustrates Directgov’s website (www.direct.gov.uk) which has been developed by considering accessibility issues.

Figure – 1: Directgov serves to the public

As a result, web accessibility is essential for being universally accessible by all people with disabilities. 2.2.	Who is responsible

Within the accessibility of the web environment, most responsibilities belong to the web developers. On the other hand, of course, web software that is used to develop websites also has a big portion of this responsibility. The necessity of the web software is to assist developers to create an accessible website as well as being usable by all people with disabilities.

In the issues raised above, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops web standards. Another touchstone that develops web standards, Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), is a part of W3C that also pursues W3C processes.

Therefore, in order to define issues with solutions, WAI develops Guidelines and Techniques. For this purpose WAI has developed standards called W3C recommendations. Figure – 1 below illustrates that the interaction between users, developers and contents on a website showing how they relay on the accessibility guidelines.

Figure – 2: Interaction tree (WAI official website, http://www.w3.org/WAI/guid-tech, retrieved  on 21 September 2007)

2.3.	More or Less Technical Aspect

The universal standards such as W3C family determine the technical aspects of a website. Obviously the technical aspect is decided by the web owner who publishes the website for their own usage. As a result of that, it can be said that the website whether it is designed for commercial or public purpose, always universal standards should be followed and applied to the website against to technology compatibility, accessibility and usability issues. 2.3.1.	Flaws

The mentioned study has showed that most website designers exclude alternative text for images or other media components such as audio or video in a web page or they use it incorrectly which does not really refer to exact meaning. As a result of that, it affects to screen readers, which designed to read web contents deafeningly for disabled people such as blind and dyslexic. Therefore, they do not work properly and the website should not be able to be used by these people.

Testers defined the second issue as improperly titled frames, which still affect screen readers not read web contents properly. (Guardian News, http://society.guardian.co.uk/e-public/story/0,,1741321,00.html, retrieved  on 21 September 2007)

Other issues defined by the testers are to use table incorrectly within a web page and poor scripting, which results in representing of changing the language.

In addition, one of the most necessary weaknesses for the web developers might be that the accessibility rules published by WCAG (World Wide Web Consortium's Content Accessibility Guidelines) are not available in all languages.

Other technical issues are related to the languages used to develop a website such as XHTML, CSS etc. These standards are developed for making the web internationally accepted. Using these standard allow web pages to be known and rendered by all different type of web browsers. 2.4.	How a Website is Made Accessible

With using determined web standards, the CabinetOffice, the head of government, announces a checklist of building a website in universal accessibility criteria in the e-Government Unit (eGU) website, whose mission is explained as to“... provide better, more efficient, public services” (E-Government Unit official website, http://archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/e-government/about/, retrieved  on 22 September 2007).

The eGU publishes a checklist for making websites universally accessible. The checklist starts with “Keep pages simple” (E-Government Unit, http://archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/e-government/resources/handbook/html/2-4.asp, retrieved  on 22 September 2007). which is actually aimed by the W3C while develops standards. Therefore such as XHTML and CSS standard has been developed to make web stabile, simple to edit codes easily. All related issues caused by the code source must be corrected by following the W3C’s standards.

While developing a websites, disability act also has to be considered and followed. Especially, text size, font, text and background colours should carefully be selected as defined in the checklist.

“All web pages must comply to the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) ‘A’ standard” (E-Government Unit, http://archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/e-government/resources/handbook/html/2-4.asp, retrieved  on 22 September 2007) requirement is obliged by the accessibility checklist developed by the government.

In addition, there are technical stuff that help to develop accessible websites such as web accessibility evaluation tools provided by the W3C. This software can be reached online and it is free to use. This tool checks the website whether it meets to accessibility guidelines. (W3C - web accessibility evaluation tools, http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/, retrieved  on 23 September 2007).

3.	 Internationally Agreed Standard of Website Accessibility
At the present time, W3C has been accepted as the web standard. For making web standard which basically validates websites’ measurement, there are some guidelines developed by W3C and divided into work groups by WAI. These are;

•	Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG); concentrates on the information in a website such as text, images and videos etc. WCAG is mostly determined for accessibility tool developers, authoring tool developers and content developers such as website designers. As each standard has, WCAG also has checkpoints that show how guidelines submit applications within a particular area. There are techniques under each checkpoint that refers to Techniques for WCAG documents. These are;

	Core Techniques 	HTML Techniques 	CSS Techniques

•	Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG); concentrates on the software that is used to create websites.

•	User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG); concentrates on the web browsers as well as telling to assistive technology.

In order to validate the websites, the governments also make rules that support and recommend W3C standardisation.

4.	 Conclusion
Consequently, all studies have been run for testing government web sites show that the information especially on the public web area is not accessible to all people with disabilities. Making the web accessible and usable for all people with disabilities bring responsibilities to everyone such as web developers, website publishers and software developers who make software to be used for web developing etc.

In addition to that, some other aspects also have to be considered such as technical side. Therefore, basically the universal accessibility checklist listed above illustrates the core point of making the website. By considering this point of view, there are several approaches can be addressed.

•	First is the government side. The accessibility standards, which are made by the governments and some other consortiums such as W3C, should be applied to the websites to make them accessible and usable by all people with disabilities. This approach allows especially public websites to be accessible by all. So, making rules for standardisations and following and controlling these rules on the published websites is the major part of making the web universal. •	Second, some other foundations: Essentially the W3C has been run its role as a leader in the web standards environment for years. Therefore, after making the websites accessible, to be able to make sure and verify that the website is accessible, standards of the W3C should be applied and their recognition should be displayed. •	Technical side where the programming and coding are developed with the determined software should be verified by the standards. In other words, the software, used for developing the website also need to be verified to show that the software is qualified to work with for developing a accessible websites. •	Technical side also includes the user agents’ compatibility issues. While the websites are being developed, all types of user agents - browsers whether they are older or newer versions should be supported to display the website without any problem. This compatibility issues should be solved, because it cannot be assumed that all users with disabilities use same type of web browsers with the same version number. •	Another important point of developing accessible website is to consider the all type of end users. Developing an accessible and usable websites approach provides equal opportunity to all people with disabilities. In details, it is possible to gather a technical information about the end user, however mostly it is impossible to recognise the end user’s characteristics whether disable or not. As mentioned above regarding the end user types, while some people can see, read and make a decision, on the hand they cannot press any button on the keyboard or mouse. Or another example is that while user does not have any series physical disabilities, but cannot recognise some text sizes unless it is big enough on a web page. In other words, while creating a website, it should be assumed that all people have different characteristic and different physical or mental problem to understand which makes the website universally accessible.

5.	References
Guardian News, http://society.guardian.co.uk/e-public/story/0,,1741321,00.html, retrieved  on 21 September 2007

WAI official website, http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/accessibility.php, retrieved  on 21 September 2007

Office of Public Sector Information, Disability Discrimination Act 1995, http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1995/ukpga_19950050_en_2#pt1-l1g1, retrieved  on 22 September 2007

WAI official website, http://www.w3.org/WAI/guid-tech, retrieved  on 22 September 2007

WCAG official website, http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php, retrieved  on 23 September 2007

E-Government Unit official website, http://archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/e-government/about/, retrieved  on 22 September 2007

Universal Accessibility Checklist / E-Government Unit, http://archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/e-government/resources/handbook/html/2-4.asp, retrieved  on 22 September 2007

W3C - web accessibility evaluation tools, http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/, retrieved  on 23 September 2007

WebXM, http://www.watchfire.com/products/webxm/siteusability.aspx, retrieved on 24 September 2007