3 Questions: A Web for everyone
During the opening ceremonies of this summer’s Olympic games in London, a musical performance culminated with a stage-set house rising into the rafters to reveal Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, sitting at a computer and typing the words “This is for everyone.”That message was not idly chosen. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) — the organization, headed by Berners-Lee, that develops technological standards for the Web — is committed to the idea that the benefits of the Web should be available, not only to people in different countries with different technological resources, but to people with disabilities. According to some estimates, that’s a billion people worldwide.In 2008, W3C released the second version of its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. This week, the International Standards Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) announced their endorsement of those guidelines.Judy Brewer, a principal research scientist at MIT’s...