Before we talk about accessibility lets look at how it all came about in the first place.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a graduate from the Oxford University invented the world wide web (www) while at CERN. Berners-Lee wrote the first web client and server in 1990.
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools).
ACCESSIBILITY
So why is this important? Well, basically it’s all about making the information we produce and diseminate via the web is in a format which all users can access… It is like watching a program on TV which has sub titles… That’s all fine and well if you can read, but it is not accessible to those who can’t.
So the upshot of accessibility on the web is:
- Make it accessible
- Ensure the content is in a text format that can be read by the computer
- Avoid using images for text
- Styling text in a font that is readable by the computer
- Setting accessibility properties for content
- Time based presentation
When building a web site, it is the web developer’s responsibility to make their content accessible. We at Jump! are serious about accessibility, if there is any part of the site you can’t access please let us know.