Moving beyond specific guidelines for accessibility in the CWRL, this page provides links to discussions and information relevant to the practice and theory of accessibility across academic disciplines and in the public sphere. These links have been organized and annotated to aid teachers and researchers in their search. Also included is an RSS feed for recent issues and developments in accessibility.

Places to Start

• Dive into Accessibility is a great primer about the why and how of accessibility. It is a free online book that is short, easy to read and very intuitive. This is a great resource to both learn about and teach accessibility.
• Knowbility is a non-profit organization that advocates the independence of children and adults with disabilities by promoting the use and improving the availability of accessible information technology. It grew from the community collaboration that produced the first Accessibility Internet Rally here in Austin. Its major contributors include Dr. John Slatin and Sharron Rush. This is a great site to learn about Accessibility advocacy in the U.S. and get a sense of what is at stake.
• Usability is the official government site of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for “designing usable, useful and accessible Web sites and user interfaces.” The site offers guidelines, methods for design, and a basic overview of usability and its importance.

Web Accessibility Guidelines and Design

• The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards including accessibility. They also author and regulate principal technologies that form the basis of the World Wide Web. The following are some of the must-visit pages from this site: Web Accessibility Initiative, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Checklist, Quick Tips
• UT-Austin's Web Accessibility Guidelines, and Web Publishing Guidelines are UT’s official guidelines for accessibility and web publishing. They are fairly straightforward. They mainly conform to section 508 in the Rehabilitation Act although it encourages developers to go beyond the official basic guidelines.
• University of Wisconsin’s Trace CenterUW’s Trace Center focuses on designing a more usable world and offers a wealth of tips and information about designing web pages with usability in mind. In addition to various guidelines for accessibility, the site provides links to web design suggestions and guides for creating More Usable Documents

General Media Accessibility Guidelines and Resources

• The CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) is a research and development facility dedicated to the issues of media and information technology for people with disabilities in their homes, schools, workplaces, and communities. Its main aims are to expand access to present and future media for people with disabilities; to explore how existing access technologies may benefit other populations; to represent its constituents in industry, policy and legislative circles; and to provide access to educational and media technologies for special needs students. This site expands the scope of discussion and provides resources to think about accessibility particularly with the explosion of multimedia content both within and without the Web

Tools for Checking Accessibility

• Watchfire's WebXAct Website Accessibility Tool is a free, useful online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues. A subscription is necessary to test your entire website instead of on a page by page basis.
• ATutor's AChecker is an experimental Web service developed at the Adaptive Technology Resource Center (ATRC). It is a model system that demonstrates how Web pages may be checked for accessibility problems. The accessibility checks in this system are based upon the proposed Open Accessibility Checks, which are under development. Evaluations produced by this software are not yet considered valid - this is still an experimental service.
• WebAIM provides a succinct section 508 check list excerpted from the Rehabilitation Act as well as a Wave Accessibility Tool that tests single pages of web content for accessibility like Watchfire’s WebXAct Website Accessibility Tool. It provides four easy methods including adding what they call a “bookmarklet” to your browser bookmarks. You would then simply go to the web page and click on the bookmark to process it through WAVE.
• ICDRI's Cynthia Says Accessibility Tool is less comprehensive than Watchfire, ATutor, or WebAIM, but nonetheless a serviceable free online tool for checking accessibility.

Resources in Print

• Slatin, John M, and Sharron Rush. Maximum Accessibility: Making Your Web Site More Usable for Everyone. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2002. This is the seminal book on accessibility co-authored by our own Dr. John Slatin. It is a comprehensive resource for creating Web sites that comply with U.S. accessibility standards and conform to the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. This book offers an overview of key issues, discusses the standards in depth, and presents practical design techniques, up-to-date technologies, and testing methods to implement these standards for maximum accessibility. In short this books shows why good design is accessible design.

Organizations

• AccessAbility SIG. This special interest group of the Society for Technical Communication is dedicated to providing accessibility resources to technical communicators.
• ACM SIGACCESS. The Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing "promotes the interests of professionals working on research and development of computing and information technology to help persons with disabilities."
• GAWDS. The Guild of Accessible Web Designers is "a worldwide association of professional organisations, web designers and developers working together to promote the use and preservation of accessible design standards."