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The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 or ADA is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability. It affords similar protections against discrimination to Americans with disabilities as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made discrimination based on race, religion, sex, national origin, and other characteristics illegal, and later sexual orientation and gender identity. In addition, unlike the Civil Rights Act, the ADA also requires covered employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities, and imposes accessibility requirements on public accommodations.
In 1998 the US Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. Section 508 was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals. The law applies to all Federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology. Under Section 508, agencies must give employees with disabilities and members of the public access to information that is comparable to the access available to others.
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design ; authoring, including standardised code and proprietary software; user experience design ; and search engine optimization. Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all. The term "web design" is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end design of a website including writing markup. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and be up to date with web accessibility guidelines.
An HTML editor is a program for editing HTML, the markup of a web page. Although the HTML markup in a web page can be controlled with any text editor, specialized HTML editors can offer convenience and added functionality. For example, many HTML editors handle not only HTML, but also related technologies such as CSS, XML and JavaScript or ECMAScript. In some cases they also manage communication with remote web servers via FTP and WebDAV, and version control systems such as Subversion or Git. Many word processing, graphic design and page layout programs that are not dedicated to web design, such as Microsoft Word or Quark XPress, also have the ability to function as HTML editors.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is an effort to improve the accessibility of the World Wide Web for people with disabilities. People with disabilities may encounter difficulties when using computers generally, but also on the Web. Since people with disabilities often require non-standard devices and browsers, making websites more accessible also benefits a wide range of user agents and devices, including mobile devices, which have limited resources.
Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible development ensures both "direct access" and "indirect access" meaning compatibility with a person's assistive technology.
The Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988, title VII, subtitle N of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, Pub. L. 100–690, 102 Stat. 4181, enacted November 18, 1988, H.R. 5210, is part of a United States Act of Congress which places stringent record-keeping requirements on the producers of actual, sexually explicit materials. The guidelines for enforcing these laws, part of the United States Code of Federal Regulations, require producers of sexually explicit material to obtain proof of age for every model they shoot, and retain those records. Federal inspectors may at any time launch inspections of these records and prosecute any infraction.
Web accessibility, or eAccessibility, is the inclusive practice of ensuring there are no barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to, websites on the World Wide Web by people with physical disabilities, situational disabilities, and socio-economic restrictions on bandwidth and speed. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, more users have equal access to information and functionality.
WebCT or Blackboard Learning System, now owned by Blackboard, is an online proprietary virtual learning environment system that is licensed to colleges and other institutions and used in many campuses for e-learning. To their WebCT courses, instructors can add such tools as discussion boards, mail systems, and live chat, along with content including documents and web pages. The latest versions of this software are now called Webcourses. WebCT is significant in that it was the world's first widely successful course management system for higher education. At its height, it was in use by over 10 million students in 80 countries.
The alt attribute is the HTML attribute used in HTML and XHTML documents to specify alternative text that is to be displayed in place of an element that cannot be rendered. The alt attribute is used for short descriptions, with longer descriptions using the longdesc attribute. The standards organization for the World Wide Web, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), recommends that every image displayed through HTML have an alt attribute, though the alt attribute does not need to contain text. The lack of proper alt attributes on website images has led to several accessibility-related lawsuits.
The Web Standards Project (WaSP) was a group of professional web developers dedicated to disseminating and encouraging the use of the web standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, along with other groups and standards bodies.
The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) is an organization for the promotion of the rights of deaf people in the United States. NAD was founded in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1880 as a non-profit organization run by Deaf people to advocate for deaf rights, its first president being Robert P. McGregor of Ohio. It includes associations from all 50 states and Washington, DC, and is the US member of the World Federation of the Deaf, which has over 120 national associations of Deaf people as members. It has its headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland.
PDF/A is an ISO-standardized version of the Portable Document Format (PDF) specialized for use in the archiving and long-term preservation of electronic documents. PDF/A differs from PDF by prohibiting features unsuitable for long-term archiving, such as font linking and encryption. The ISO requirements for PDF/A file viewers include color management guidelines, support for embedded fonts, and a user interface for reading embedded annotations.
PAS 78: Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites is a Publicly Available Specification published on March 8, 2006 by the British Standards Institution in collaboration with the Disability Rights Commission. It provides guidance to organisations in how to go about commissioning an accessible website from a design agency. It describes what is expected from websites to comply with the UK Disability Discrimination Act 1995, making websites accessible to and usable by disabled people
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are part of a series of web accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main international standards organization for the Internet. They are a set of recommendations for making Web content more accessible, primarily for people with disabilities—but also for all user agents, including highly limited devices, such as mobile phones. WCAG 2.0, were published in December 2008 and became an ISO standard, ISO/IEC 40500:2012 in October 2012. WCAG 2.1 became a W3C Recommendation in June 2018.
In 2003 and following years, initiatives were instituted to improve internet access for people with disabilities in the Philippines. These measures were inspired by the UNESCAP "Asia-Pacific Decade for Disabled Persons" (1993–2002). Key organizations included the government body National Council for the Welfare of Disabled Persons (Philippines) and the private sector body Philippine Web Accessibility Group (PWAG). The "Disabled Friendly Website Awards" were launched to encourage web designers to incorporate universal access. Since 2009 unhampered access to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has been in the second National Human Rights Action Plan of the Philippine government.
Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) is a template containing information regarding how an Information and communications technology product or service conforms with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended. Section 508 provides guidelines for rendering ICT accessible to, and therefore usable by, people with disabilities. The VPAT was originally designed as a tool for vendors to document product compliance to Section 508 and facilitate government market research on ICT with accessible features. Many people started to call the completed document a "VPAT" but the wider procurement community would prefer to call it a product Accessibility Conformance Report, or ACR. The distinction is that the "VPAT" is the incomplete form, and the ACR is the completed report using the VPAT template.
AnySurfer is a Belgian organisation that promotes the accessibility of websites, apps, and digital documents for disabled individuals. It is also the name of a quality label which websites can obtain if they are fully accessible. AnySurfer is a national project run by Blindenzorg Licht en Liefde, a Belgian non-profit organisation that provides aid to the blind and the visually impaired.
accessiBe is a technology company working to solve the problem of web accessibility through AI. The company has raised $58 million in two rounds of funding. The company's technology uses machine learning algorithms to analyze and modify website content in order to make it more accessible. accessiBe's services are designed to help website owners comply with laws and regulations related to web accessibility, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in the United States. However, most accessibility experts agree that overlay solutions like accessiBe can not properly address ADA compliance issues. There is a consensus among these accessibility experts that using an overlay alone to ensure legal compliance can sometimes cause accessibility issues and compliance problems.