Some aspects of Web accessibility are easy. For those, it is clear what is good for accessibility and what is bad for accessibility; it is "black and white". However, there are also many "gray areas" where it is difficult to define what is good and what is bad for accessibility overall. Most Web accessibility projects focus on research and development in the gray areas — determining solutions, guidelines, and evaluation criteria for the difficult aspects of Web accessibility. While it is important that we continue to work on the difficult aspects, we risk alienating mainstream Web developers if we focus only in those gray areas. We need to also focus on making the black and white aspects clear and easy for everyone involved in Web development.

This talk covers improving Web accessibility in the mainstream by:

• Understanding the interdependent components and responsibilities of Web accessibility
• Actively encouraging improvements in authoring tools
• Providing introductory and basic tutorial material
• Promoting standards harmonization internationally
• Developing business case data and examples
• Clarifying myths

This talk also introduces issues of the intersections between accessibility and usability (a very gray area, indeed).

WCAG 2.0 is a "boundary object." It defines authors' responsibility in making Web content accessible to people with disabilities. It also seeks to respect the boundaries between accessibility and related concerns such as usability and Web standards. But although WCAG 2.0 has been long in coming, its publication as a W3C Recommendation will be just the beginning. WCAG 2.0 introduces new ways of thinking about accessibility and opens up a space for exchange among many different communities of practice within the international Web community-usability specialists; developers and proponents of Web standards; vendors of authoring tools, user agents, and assistive technologies, and evaluation tools; government regulators; Web developers; content providers; and of course accessibility experts. These exchanges may often sound like heated debates rather than reasoned conversations. But they are not incidental nor accidental. They are integral to the process of interpreting WCAG 2.0 and the continuing evolution of the Web itself.

This presentation discusses the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as a "boundary object," focusing especially on WCAG 2.0. WCAG represents a consensus among working group participants-including industry representatives, academic researchers, Web developers, disability advocates, etc.-about the author's responsibilities in making Web content accessible to people with disabilities, and about the boundaries between accessibility and related concerns such as usability and Web standards. But WCAG is merely a document: it comes to life in practice.

Panelists:

• Shawn Lawton Henry
• John Slatin
• Inmaculada Placencia
• Jesús García
• Enrique Varela
• Cristina Rodríguez-Porrero

This national award is intended to acknowledge the work carried out by individuals and private and public organizations who have apply, in the development of Web contents and Web sites, the accessibility guidelines, developed by W3C, with the goal to ensure equal Web Access for All.

The prize-giving will be at the end of this session.

I did my first studies of Web usability in 1994, so more than ten years later it's time to reassess what we know about user behavior online. Based on a new major series of user studies, it's surprising how many of the old guidelines continue to hold, but some do need modification. We also continue to discover new guidelines, as we research new issues such as multimedia. Accompanied by several video clips from the new user research, I will assess past usability guidelines and current knowledge about user behavior on the Web.

Web design's first decade proceeded without the benefit of standards to control visual layout, document structure, and interactive behavior. The result was sites that worked for some people but not others, took forever to load, hid their subject matter from search engines, and contained data that could not be accessed by screen readers and web phones. Web standards solve these problems and more.

Jeffrey Zeldman, creative director of Happy Cog Studios, author of Designing With Web Standards, and group leader emeritus of The Web Standards Project (WaSP) will share the untold story of how he and the WaSP persuaded first browser makers and then designers to embrace W3C technologies as "standards," and will then show the standards in use on some of today's most advanced yet accessible sites.

The current web doesn't deal with diversity very well; it is full of low-usability, inaccessible websites. Even if you have good eyesight it can be difficult, thanks to the large number of websites that render their texts with tiny fonts sized in pixels; but if you have poor eyesite, or are blind, it is truly a torture: vast numbers of current websites are designed for visual use only, on fixed screen sizes, on a single platform.

But this is bad, not just for us individually because we all need usabile sites, and will all one day need accessible sites, but because there are also solid economic reasons why a site should be usable and accessible. For instance, there's a blind billionaire user out there, with millions of friends who listen to his every word, who's going to make website builders realise that there is a very clear economic reason for making websites accessible for all...

This talk will discuss how markup langauges now being designed at W3C have been designed explicitely with usability, accessibility and device independence in mind and demonstrate how closely intertwined these three topics are.

Panelists:

• Jakob Nielsen
• Jeffrey Zeldman
• Steven Pemberton
• Javier Cañada
• Alfonso de la Nuez
• Nacho Puell