Campus aims to improve Web accessibility

In his role as customer service coordinator for the WiscINFO Directory, an index of registered web sites at the university, John Heim is constantly on the Internet.

At times his job is challenging, because some World Wide Web sites and pages are not coded for access for the disabled, and Heim is legally blind.

“Since I browse the web for a living, inaccessible web pages are a big problem for me,” says Heim, who was diagnosed as a teenager with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease.

Heim is working to make UW–Madison’s web sites more available for people with vision, hearing or other physical disabilities. He is part of a small group of university employees that is drafting a new campus web accessibility policy.

“Once the guidelines are in place and campus units begin to implement them, if they haven’t already, it will make things easier for a lot of people, including me,” Heim says.

The draft policy recommends that UW–Madison endorse the web accessibility guidelines of the World Wide Web Consortium, known as W3C. This international group of more than 400 public and private organizations is crafting common protocols to promote the evolution of the World Wide Web.

The W3C recommendations are based on web accessibility guidelines first developed by UW–Madison’s Trace Research and Development Center, a national leader in making technologies such as computers more accessible to the disabled.

“The Web is being incorporated into both our campus and our courses in such a fashion that not having access to it will soon result in an inability to compete and participate in the educational process here for most if not all degree programs,” says Gregg Vanderheiden, director of the Trace Center and professor of industrial engineering.

The UW–Madison draft policy will call for university web pages to comply with W3C guidelines, with priority given to student-specific pages, such as admissions, advising, coursework and registration.

“Access to the web is the single greatest challenge that students with disabilities are facing today in education,” says J. Trey Duffy, director of the McBurney Disability Resource Center. The McBurney Center provides services for about 1,000 disabled students on campus and numerous prospective students.

“That is largely because education is about information, and the web is about information, so the issue is how can we share that information so it is accessible to everyone, regardless of disability,” Duffy adds.

Many UW–Madison web sites and pages are already accessible for people with disabilities, because they are coded for use with adaptive hardware and software.

That’s how Heim surfs the web. He uses software popular with blind computer users called JAWS, which stands for Job Access with Speech. The speech output software reads the text on a web site, and the user can speed up or slow down the rate of speech.

“I usually use my headphones” when using JAWS, says Heim during a recent demonstration of the software at his worksite, located in the Division of Information Technology’s unit at the University Research Park.

Heim has been using JAWS for about the past four months as his vision has worsened. While browsing various web sites, he shows firsthand how some are easy to access and others are not. When a web page uses a lot of graphics but offers no alternative text option, JAWS simply says “link graphic” — which Heim describes as a “major pain.”

“But the new accessibility guidelines do not mean that university web pages cannot be flashy,” he quickly adds. “They can use images and frames.”

The group developing the new campus web accessibility policy hopes to finish the draft this fall. The draft will then be forwarded for review to Melany S. Newby, vice chancellor for legal and executive affairs and the university’s coordinator of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The policy could be implemented sometime in 2001.

DoIT offers courses, seminars and professional development opportunities on creating accessible web pages. Employees and campus units can take advantage of these educational resources to learn more about making their web pages compliant with the new accessibility guidelines.