Workpackage 7
In this workpackage it was planned to develop guidelines and a web-authoring tool to enable information providers to make their web sites easier and more accessible by people with complex communication needs who use graphic symbol-based augmentative and alternative communication (AAC).
The results of this workpackage are useful for Special Information Providers, such as institutions for social service, rehabilitation and special needs education, care centres and homes for the elderly.
The guidelines have already been proposed to be included in the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative's (WAI) draft Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0). The work concerning web authoring tools is still in progress.
Guidelines
The first stage of the development and proposal of guidelines was to develop an internal project resource, documenting requirements identified in the early phases of the WWAAC project and current work in the area of Web accessibility.
A framework for design guidelines is described using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 1.0, and then concentrates on the working drafts of WCAG 2.0 in order to facilitate integration of WWAAC recommendations with current drafts and discussions.
A number of issues were discussed with experts within and outside the consortium: whether to have one site for all or two alternative sites, the conflicting needs of users, simplicity of content, summaries of content, top loading, tagging images, navigation mechanisms, and search engines. Discussions on these issues have helped to form a basis for guideline development and have led to recommendations for an AAC-enabled World Wide Web, with rationale based on the WWAAC project's user requirements and evaluation work.
These recommendations have been proposed as success criteria, examples and strategies to be included in the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative's (WAI) draft Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0). The guidelines together with the background information can be found in a final document on the Documents Page.