Is Accessibility an Issue in the Knowledge Society? Modern Web Applications in the Ligth of Accessibility

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Authors

BÁRTEK Luděk OŠLEJŠEK Radek PITNER Tomáš

Year of publication 2010
Type Article in Proceedings
Conference Organizational, Business and Technological Aspects of the Knowledge Society
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Informatics

Citation
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16324-1_40
Field Informatics
Keywords Web 2.0; Rich Internet Applications; accessibility; W3C Recommendations; WAI-ARIA
Description Recent development in Web shows a significant trend towards more user participation, massive use of new devices including portables, and high interactivity. Web is no more solely a publication medium, but an environment for participation. The user participation goes hand in hand with inclusion of all potential user groups, not excluding people with special needs. However, we claim that albeit all the effort towards accessibility, it has not yet found an appopriate reflection among stakeholders of the ``Top Web Applications'' nor their users. This leads to undesired causes --- the business-driven Web without \emph{all user} participation is not a really democratic medium and, actually, does not comply with the original characteristics of Web 2.0. The paper demonstrates this unfavourable state and tries to find answers and perspectives of further development including standardization processes and technical obstacles behind. It also shows ways and particular techniques to cope with the challenge based on our own research and development in accessible graphics and dialog-based systems.
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