April is Accessiblity Month

The entire month of April, 1998, has been designated "Accessibility Month" at the HTML Writers Guild. The purpose of this special month-long event is to highlight the value and importance of designing all web sites with complete accessibility in mind -- meaning, the pages you write should be equally useable in the latest versions of major browsers as in a voice-reader for the blind, or by anyone else with a non-"standard" means of accessing the web.

During the month of April, we'll be using the Guild's resources to educate both our membership, numbering over 60,000 web designers, and the web industry as a whole about this important issue, through a number of special projects and events.

One of the primary focuses of Accessibility Month will be on the World Wide Web Consortium's guidelines for page authors, developed by the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). This set of recommendations provides web designers with valuable rules to keep in mind when designing a page with accessibility in mind. The WAI guidelines can be found at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-WAI-PAGEAUTH

Projects and events scheduled for Accessibility April include:

• Announcement of the special month-long focus on accessibility on the Guild's monthly newsletter, and the HWG homepage
• Interactive member chats on accessibility-related topics, with recognized authorities in the field as guest speakers and panelists
• A complete retrofitting of the Guild's web site to ensure that the HWG complies with recognized accessibility standards
• The creation of a special Accessibility Guidelines Implementation project (AGI), as members of the Guild tackle the issue head-on while crafting accessible web sites

The overall goal of Accessibility Month is to create a greater awareness, both within and outside of the Guild, of the need for and importance of accessibility considerations in web design. Questions regarding Accessibility Month can be directed to Kynn Bartlett, kynn@hwg.org.