Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Checkpoints

1) Mention the need for guidelines and norms for ‘content development’.
It is important to follow norms and guidelines as standardization increases the accessibility of information to users. Moreover, the searches on Internet could be made more precise by adhering to standards.

2) Describe the general guidelines to be followed in developing a content.
While using the electronic documents often the user faces problems with forms and formats. Generally the concepts should be made clear in the content and there should be thought flow and continuity in ideas. When structuring, the documents should be well structured and presentation aspects such as using bold fonts, underlines and colour should be taken care of.

3) What benefits can be had by adhering to standards?
Adhereing to standards ensure ‘quality’ in products. In the parlance of elcetronic and online resources standards help in providing enhanced usability which results in increased satisfaction and productivity and also provide assurance of the users well being in using the products. They provide consistency within and between systems and applications. The standards also help software customers in their selection of acceptable products. They protect the employer from complaints and
possible litigation.

4) State the basic objectives of Text encoding?
Text encoding deals with the structuring of web documents using markup tags. The guidelines for text encoding are concerned with both what textual features should be encoded (i.e. made explicit) in an electronic text, and how that encoding should be represented for loss-free, platform-independent, interchange.

5) What is Dynamic Content and the challenges presented by it?
Dynamic Content is the content generated dynamically on the web typically using information in databases. Dynamic content causes problems for indexes (search engines) and also caching (by browser or proxy server).

KEYWORDS
Accessible : Content is accessible when it may be used by someone with a disability.
Animation : A technique in which each frame of a film or movie is produced individually, whether
generated as a computer graphic, or by photographing a drawn image, or by repeatedly making small changes to a model unit (see claymation and stop motion), and then photographing the result with a special animation camera. When the frames are strung together and the resulting film is viewed at a
speed of 16 or more frames per second, there is an illusion of continuous movement (due to the persistence of vision).
Applet : A program inserted into a web page.
Assistive Technologies : Devices used by people with disabilities to access computers. Some assistive technologies include text-to-speech screen readers, alternative keyboards and mice, head pointing devices, voice recognition software, and screen magnification software.
Braille : Braille uses six raised dots in different patterns to represent letters and numbers to be read by people who are blind with their fingertips.
Computer Animation : An art of creating moving images via the use of computers. Increasingly it is created by means of 3D computer graphics, though 2D computer graphics are still widely used.
Content Developer : Someone who authors web pages or designs websites.
Device Independent : Users must be able to interact with a user agent (and the document it renders) using the supported input and output devices of their choice and according to their needs. Input
devices may include pointing devices, keyboards, braille devices, head wands, microphones, and others. Output devices may include monitors, speech synthesizers, and braille devices.
Dynamic Content : Dynamic Content is automatically or dynamically generated web pages typically
produced using information in databases.
Element : An element is a syntactic construct and more generally means a type of content (such as
video or sound) or a logical construct (such as a header or list). An element that causes text characters to be part of the document is called a text element.
IEC : International Electrotechnical Commission.
Image : A graphical presentation.
Link Text : The rendered text content of a link.
Natural Language : Spoken, written, or signed human languages such as French, Japanese, American Sign Language, and braille. The natural language of content may be indicated with the ‘lang’ attribute in HTML and the “xml:lang” attribute in XML.
Navigation Bar : A navigation bar is a collection of links to the most important parts of a document or site.
Navigation Mechanism : A navigation mechanism is any means by which a user can navigate a page or site. Some typical mechanisms include: navigation bars, site maps and tables of contents.
Plug-Ins : Software programs that enhance other programs or applications on your computer.
There are plug-ins for Internet browsers, graphics programs, and other applications.
Site Map : A site map provides a global view of the organization of a page or site.
Style Sheet : A style sheet is a set of statements that specify presentation of a document. Style sheets may have three different origins: they may be written by content providers, created by users, or built
into user agents. In CSS, the interaction of content provider, user, and user agent style sheets is called the cascade.
Table of Contents : A table of contents generally lists (and links to) the most important sections of a document.
Tabular Information : When tables are used to represent logical relationships among data – text, numbers, images, etc., that information is called ‘tabular information’ and the tables are called ‘data
tables’. The relationships expressed by a table may be rendered visually (usually on a twodimensional
grid), aurally (often preceding cells with header information), or in other formats.
User Agent : Software to access web content, including desktop graphical browsers, text browsers,
voice browsers, mobile phones, multimedia players, plug-ins, and some software assistive technologies used in conjunction with browsers such as screen readers, screen magnifiers, and
voice recognition software.

Source: IGNOU Study Material