II. Web Accessibility
Web accessibility is a rather new concept. It was first introduced in 1997 by the W3C's specification for HTML 4.0 (Raggett, Le Hors and Jacobs, 1997). HTML 4.0 was indeed offering a few mechanisms to improve accessibility of websites such as:
- “Better distinction between document structure and presentation, thus encouraging the use of style sheets instead of HTML presentation elements and attributes.
- “The requirement that alternate text accompany an image included via the IMG element.
- “A wider range of target media (TTY, Braille, etc.) for use with style sheets” (Raggett, Le Hors and Jacobs, 1997).
It is also important to note that around 1997, the Internet was become more and more popular, especially for non-technical users who started to create their own webpage using WYSIWYG editors. However, if these editors are very easy to use, they are very far from producing conformed code; plus, the lack of knowledge of many users in the use of the proper tag to produce the wanted result conducted to the spreading of layout table, which is one of the worse accessibility mistake one can make. However, at a time were web browser were not able to fully handle CSS, were offering proprietary HTML tags and CSS elements; it was difficult to offer a website that would look the same on every screen without this layout table.
In 1999, the WAI, which is conducted by the W3C, released the first WCAG. This guideline was providing a set of recommendation for web developers toward web accessibility. In 2000, to face the problem of WYSIWYG editors that were not producing accessible content, the W3C released the ATAG 1.0.
Since 2000, many countries have been establishing laws toward web accessibility, especially for public and government websites (See 3.1. What the Law Says), but nowadays, web accessibility is still being neglected. The association Web Pour Tous (Web For All) states that: “Actually 98% of European state websites are inaccessible” (Aniort, Levy and Galey, 2008).