As I mentioned last week, the American Federation for the Blind sued a handful of large U.S. corporate entities over the past five years because those corporations' Websites didn't accommodate Internet users who suffered from visual impairments. While judges repeatedly threw these cases out of court, the corporations involved with these lawsuits to date have changed their sites to accommodate the users' demands anyway. While these changes seem to reflect a proclivity for human or civil rights, the bottom line concerns global business savvy and impending changes in Website developments.

If you're about to create a business Website, you might want to have the following history about Website accessibility in your back pocket (because your Website designer may remain unaware). Once this history is established, the following article will explain why this history is important in the tech market and in business acumen, because the following insights affect Website designs and they also affects how "user agents," or the various tools that display Web pages and other applied technologies, will continue to change or become obsolete:

1. 1973: Well before the Internet became a household application, the U.S. passed Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. This program continues to provide training and related services to people with a wide range of disabilities primarily to equip them for entry or reentry into the workforce.
   
   
2. 1989 - present day: the Internet developed from a purely scientific tool to a household shopping venue, online textbook, and entertainment source. Web developers produced sites that remain basically functional for the general public yet that are inaccessible to individuals with disabilities. In other words, the code used to develop sites cannot be read or "spoken" by screen or braille reading machines, nor can people who cannot use a mouse navigate through some of these Websites.
   
   
3. 1989 - present day: User agents, or Web browsers like the one that you use at home, and other "assistive technologies" like braille and screen readers which enable blind users to access the Internet, evolved through incompatible and aggressively competitive upgrades. In other words, one user might see one version of a site, but another Web browser might render that site differently. These changes affected the general public.
   
   
4. October 1994: Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science [MIT/LCS] in collaboration with CERN (European laboratory for particle physics in Geneva [Conseil Europ?en pour la Recherche Nucl?aire]). To this day, the W3C continues to press fair practices in Website development. Any Web designer worth her salt knows the W3C standards and guidelines inside out, but she may not apply W3C principles to her designs. For instance, in a 2004 U.K. study, 81 out of 100 current business Websites in the U.K. don't meet W3C standards although many Website commissioners and developers claimed that they were aware of the W3C principles.
   
   
5. 1995: Great Britain developed the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and a secondary legislation which applied within Northern Ireland. This act placed a legal duty on service providers to make reasonable adjustments to provide services to disabled individuals. This act applied to Websites when a site fell within the definition of a "service" under DDA's terminology.
   
   
6. August 7, 1998: Congress amended Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (29 U.S.C. 794d) to expand the federal government's responsibility to provide usable electronic and information technology to people with disabilities. Section 508 specifically identifies the remedies allowed under Section 505(a)(2), which are in turn implied under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These remedies allow affirmative action, but this action currently applies only to Federal Websites. For this reason, cases about corporate Website inaccessibility are dismissed.
   
   
7. April 2000: The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) in the U.K. published a Code of Practice entitled, "Rights of Access - Goods, Facilities, Services and Premises" that accentuated the DDA's premise about accessible Websites. The Code explicity defines Websites as "services," but the language about accessibility remains too unclear to press legal issues about wrongdoing on Websites which are - for all intents and purposes - global rather than local.
   
   
8. April 2003: The W3C agreed to join the EuroAccessibility Consortium (EA) project when they signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in Paris for EA's creation. The MoU states governing principles towards establishing a harmonized set of Internet support services across Europe. The principles encompass a common evaluation methodology, technical assistance, and a European certification authority for Web accessibility.
   
   
9. March 2006: The DRC in cooperation with the British Standards Institution (BSI) published the Publicly Available Specification (PAS). Known now as the PAS 78 (because it contains 78 pages in the printed version), this document is not to be regarded as a British Standard - but - it reads as a warning to Web "commissioners" (those who commission a Website to be built, which is a broad category), to software developers, and to Website technologies about inaccessibility, and it provides remedies for failures to comply.

Cora asked, "Mom! Does all this goobledegook apply to my blog?" No, my dear, it doesn't - yet. The U.S. Department of Justice still waffles over whether Websites are "public places of accommodation," whereas the U.K. has definitely defined Websites as "services" which must comply with W3C guidelines. At any rate, none of these issues have become "law" for business or personal Websites locally or globally, but the European Union (EU) seems intent on pressing the issue as they hash out terminology contained within certain civil and human rights' legislations and policies.

Since the Internet is global, it seems to stand to reason that the U.S. will join in on this movement?or will it? I'll explain in the next article why U.S. companies and Web developers may not have a choice in this matter and, accordingly, how this global human and civil rights movement will affect tech and business markets.

Until Then,
Linda Goin