Re: thesis up on the web

This might be of interest   to some .
----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Kathryn Ann Clancy 
  To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org 
  Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 7:16 PM
  Subject: thesis up on the web



  I have recently undertaken and completed an honours thesis in the area of Web 
  accessibility and thought that it might be of interest to the people on this 
  mailing list.

  The Abstract is as follows:
  The World Wide Web has opened up many doors for people with disabilities.
  However advances in technology, such as multimedia and graphic intensive
  Web sites, are now starting to erode these benefits of the World Wide Web for
  people with disabilities. Primarily this is due to designers creating their Web
  sites in such a fashion which does not make them accessible to people with
  disabilities.

  Research to date has not specifically examined the factors that impede and
  propel an organisation to adopt Web accessibility. Therefore, the primary
  objective of this research study is to identify these factors.
  A single case study of Web accessibility was adopted. The case study
  involves focusing on a Government organisation that develops Web sites
  aimed at an educational audience.

  An analysis of the case was accomplished and a series of recommendations
  were generated as the findings. The results of the research demonstrated that
  the case study organisation has many issues that impede and propel the
  adoption of Web accessibility within the organisation. Many of these issues
  were not mentioned in the existing literature and as a result a set of
  recommendations to overcome the factors impeding the adoption of Web
  accessibility were identified and discussed.

  In summary, this thesis investigates the reasons behind the failure to adopt
  Web accessibility and a series of recommendations specifically intended for
  the case study organisation were developed.

  The whole article can be found at 
  http://www.flatface.net/~browncouch/bit/upload/thesiskat.pdf 

  I know this is in pdf at the moment, I intend to change this to HTML asap, but 
  I'm currently working, unfortunately in an area where my web accessibility 
  knowledge is not being used!

  --Kat

  Kathryn Clancy
  BIT Honours
  0425796383
  http://www.deakin.edu.au/~kac

  Sailesh Panchang
  Senior Accessibility Engineer 
  Deque Systems,11180  Sunrise Valley Drive, 
  4th Floor, Reston VA 20191
  Tel: 703-225-0380 Extension 105 
  E-mail: sailesh.panchang@deque.com
  Fax: 703-225-0387
  * Look up <http://www.deque.com> *