Professional SharePoint® 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007

9.2. Measuring Accessibility

As mentioned earlier, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has crafted some guidelines, standards, and measures for creating accessible Web sites, all published on their site: www.andrewconnell.com/go/221. As stated on their Web site, the W3C is

... an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C's mission is: To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.

The consortium, through the hard work of many individuals, publishes standards otherwise known as W3C recommendations that developers and designers alike can use to create what are generally referred to as accessible or "valid" Web sites. It does so under the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which works with people all around the globe to create standards and guidelines to make Web sites more accessible to people with disabilities. The WAI (www.andrewconnell.com/go/222) has identified three components of accessibility:

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) — This set of guidelines is used by developers, designers, and Web authoring and accessibility evaluation tools.

• Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) — This set of guidelines pertains to Web authoring tools.

• User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) — This set of guidelines is used by clients that consume Web sites, such as browsers and media players, including ...