Re: San Fran State University

Previous Message:

I work for NYS government and we have recently adopted the W3C Guidelines
for NYS Web sites.  This has brough up many questions from NYS public
colleges and universities.  A while back there was some info on the San Fran
State University access law suit.  Can anyone provide a U.R.L. for this or
any other pertinent information to help guide us in answering these
questions.

Reply:

I don't have handy references to the URLs about San Francisco, but perhaps
some information about Utah State University's recent adoption of Web
accessibility guidelines will be of use to you, at least indirectly. Like
New York's new standards, U.S.U.'s guidelines are also based on the w3c
standards. Our policy includes all of the priority 1 and 2 standards, as
well as some of the priority 3 standards.

When I drafted these standards, I decided to reword and reorganize them
according to topic, rather than according to priority number, in the hopes
that this would simplify things (at least somewhat) for U.S.U. web
developers. The policy has not been "officially" announced, but many of the
U.S.U. webmasters know about it and have received some preliminary training
on how to comply with the standards. Enforcement will not begin for several
months (probably not until late next year) but the drive to make the pages
accessible will go into full effect at the beginning of the year. In fact,
the U.S.U. webmaster is already preparing a complete makeover of the main
university site offline.

Our own website (www.webaim.org) is in a state of transition as we begin to
take these guidelines seriously. You can access the draft of USU's
"Guidelines For Web Accessibility and Universality" at
http://www.webaim.org/usu/guidelines.htm.

By the way, the main purposes of our new, grant-funded project (Web
Accessibility in Mind, or WebAIM) is to specifically address the issue of
Web accessibility within the post-secondary education arena, so I would be
more than happy to be of service to you and to the universities you
mentioned.

Hope you find this information useful.

Paul Bohman
Technology Coordinator
Web Accessibility in Mind (WebAIM)
Center for Persons with Disabilities
Utah State University
http://www.webaim.org/

Received on Tuesday, 21 December 1999 01:32:43 UTC