HDTV/3D TV News
When it comes to real life, the disabled are considered with measures such as wheelchair ramps alongside stairs.
But the online virtual world is something which often fails to take disability into account, and a new campaign has been launched to do something about this.
Fix the Web aims to highlight lack of accessibility where it crops up on the net. The idea is that disabled people can report a problem to the site, which volunteers can assess and take forward to the webmaster in question, hopefully reaching a solution.
There are some six million disabled and older folks who have difficulty accessing the majority of content on the Internet, according to a BBC report. This can be due to cluttered layouts, small or difficult to read text, sites that don’t work with screen readers, or a combination of such factors.
You can register as a volunteer on the site if you want to help the campaign out, and currently there are 130 volunteers, with 83 websites having been reported.
The project has been initially funded by the Nominet Trust, who provided £50,000 to get it established. Citizens Online are fund raising for further money to keep Fix the Web going.
This simply isn’t true, professional web designers have been adressing this since at least 1995. W3C etc.etc.I’ve NEVER built a site without considering these issues, nor has any site that uses public money. It’s actually an offence to create a web site that doesn’t. What happens outside the UK is beyond anyone’s control but it isn’t fair to blame the ‘majority’ as you have here.
In fairness, ‘reporting’ the issue to the website will do little unless government allocates cash to site owners to correct it.It isn’t fair or reasonable to expect people to build ramps and disabled facilities in every house nor non-professional designers to build fully featured interoperability compliant web sites.