2007 PhD Thesis Final Revised.pdf - Curtin University

Prior to the WWW, virtually all Internet tasks, including the location of
information, were text-based. As with the GUI and personal computing, the WWW
improved access to the Internet for the mainstream population. The ability to learn
via visual means provided a greater understanding of information retrieval which in
turn caused the Internet to grow exponentially. Through the 1990s the Internet
moved from simply providing information and communication resources to
becoming an interactive multimedia experience. The difficulty with this approach is
that for a multimedia experience to work, the individual must be capable of using
both hearing and eyesight. Although people with hearing impairments can find some
multimedia aspects of the Internet unusable, the WWW, like the GUI, is weighted far
more towards visual observation, resulting in people with vision disabilities being
one of the most disadvantaged groups in gaining access to online information
(Goggin & Mewell, 2003).
There is a historical trend in the development of new technologies that tends
to deny people with disabilities access to promised benefits of that technology. The
development of the ETAs harnessed some of this great potential, but a lack of
consultation rendered the devices ineffective. The GUI provided many benefits to
the mainstream population, but these were again denied to people with vision
disabilities due to a lack of consultation. Once again, in the rush of developing new
graphical access to Internet-related resources, people with vision disabilities were left
struggling to gain access to information. One of the most frustrating aspects of the
Internet from the perspective of people with vision disabilities is that the use of
multimedia presentations on web sites can prevent access to text information. There
is essentially no formal process built into the creation of HTML code which ensures
accessibility. This means that a search of the WWW will generally result in the
location of some accessible pages, some semi-accessible pages and others which are
inaccessible (Harper, Kingsbury, & Hassell, 2002).
In order to ensure accessibility, web pages must conform to the W3C web
accessibility guidelines as previously discussed in section 2.6. There has been some
minor criticism of the accessibility guidelines due to the fact that it is possible to
make an inaccessible site that is W3C compliant. However, it is highly likely that if
the guidelines are used during the development of web sites, the site will be
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