A Web for All

The Web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, once said, "The power of the Web is in its universality."But for those who are blind, deaf, dyslexic, or otherwise disabled (as much as 8 to 10 percent of the population in some countries), this claim may ring hollow. Universality has also been elusive for the 43 percent of Web ...

The Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, once said, "The power of the Web is in its universality."But for those who are blind, deaf, dyslexic, or otherwise disabled (as much as 8 to 10 percent of the population in some countries), this claim may ring hollow. Universality has also been elusive for the 43 percent of Web users who don't speak English -- the language of up to 80 percent of all Web pages.

The Web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, once said, "The power of the Web is in its universality."But for those who are blind, deaf, dyslexic, or otherwise disabled (as much as 8 to 10 percent of the population in some countries), this claim may ring hollow. Universality has also been elusive for the 43 percent of Web users who don’t speak English — the language of up to 80 percent of all Web pages.

Berners-Lee’s organization, the World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3c.org), is working on making the Web more accessible for people with disabilities. It offers tips and checklists for Web designers on how to make their sites more accessible and for engineers on how to incorporate accessibility into software design. On a national level, the consortium’s policy guidelines have been adopted (and in some cases signed into law) in more than 10 countries.

A number of free Web-based machine translators, some of which claim 70 to 75 percent accuracy, help bridge the language barrier. One of the most popular, Babel Fish (world.altavista.com), translates Web pages’ text while retaining their look and feel. Babel (babel.alis.com), a project of Alis Technologies and the nonprofit Internet Society, gives technical advice on how to access and create non-English Web pages. Babel joins many others, including the Unicode Consortium (www.unicode.org), in encouraging Web developers to adopt Unicode, a system of encoding text so that it reads the same no matter what language, program, or platform was used to create it.

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