- From: Paul Bohman <paulb@cpd2.usu.edu>
- Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1999 23:40:32 -0700
- To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
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