Web 2.0

As stated by renowned accessibility expert Shawn Lawton Hewitt, Web Accessibility simply means that people with disabilities can use the Web.  More specifically, Web Accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate and interact with the Web.
Web Accessibility addresses the entire breadth of disabilities that affect access to the Web – visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities. It is easy for a non-disabled person to browse the Web. Point your mouse, see the screen, use the navigation and then concentrate of the area of the web page that contains the relevant content. But what about people with disabilities?

Some people cannot use their arms or hands to type or move a mouse. Some people with tremors and diminishing fine motor controls can use a keyboard but not a mouse. Some people cannot see at all and use a screen reader that reads aloud information in the webpage. Some people have blurry vision and cannot read text unless it is very large.

Web Accessibility tries to address these barriers that restrict access to information on the Web. 
To help include everybody in the Web, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), constituted a group called the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) whose mission was to develop the strategies, guidelines and resources to make the Web Accessible to people with disabilities.

A simplistic way of understanding the gist of these guidelines is
·  Ensuring that pictures used for communicating information have text equivalents that can be accessed by blind people
·   Audio is subtitled/transcribed for those who are hard-of-hearing
·   Links and form controls can be easily accessed by those with motor problems
·   Site is well structured for those with learning difficulties or problems with the language

The WCAG 2.0 version is currently in the working draft 11 stage.

It is important to understand one aspect that most experts agree on – an individual web site can never be perfectly accessible to everybody. This has to do with the sheer diversity of disabilities as well as the potential overlap of multiple disabilities. But a systematic approach like implementing the WCAG guidelines can go long way in accommodating a very large number of people.

Use of Web is spreading rapidly into most areas of society and daily life. In many countries, the Web is increasingly being used for government information and services, education and training, commerce, news, workplace interaction, civic participation, healthcare and more. In some cases, the Web is replacing traditional resources used to do all the things listed above. Therefore, it is essential that the Web be accessible in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities.