Many members of this list will be aware of discussions on Web accessibility
we have had over the years. At last year's Institutional Web Management
Workshop Lawrie Phipps (TechDis) and myself presented the findings of an
automated survey of UK University home pages and argued that the low level
of support with WAI WCAG guidelines (only 9 out of 161 home pages appearing
to comply with tests which can be checked automatically) did not show that
the community did not care about Web accessibility, but that the WAI model
had limitations and that the WCAG guidelines needed to be treated as
guidelines, and not as rigorous standards.

Since then UKOLN and TechDis have been working on the development of an
approach to accessibility which incorporates those aspects of WAI guidelines
which are implementable and enrich the user's experience but emphasises that
the approach should be based on the user's needs and not on implementing a
checklist.

I'm pleased to report that a paper by Lawrie and myself, with a case study
from Caro Howell on her work at the Tate, was awarded a prize for the Best
Research Paper at the ALT-C conference held at the University of Manchester
last week.

A summary of the paper, and the background to the work is available at
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/alt-c-2005/press-release>.

Lawrie and I would like to give our thanks to members of the Web management
community who have been supportive to the development of this approach (and
co-authors of previous related papers including David Sloan, Jenny Craven,
Helen Petrie and Alastair Dunning and colleagues within UKOLN and TechDis).

The paper describes how real world accessible solutions may be a viable
solution (i.e. blended accessibility for blended learning). We will continue
to develop this work and would welcome input from the Web management
community.

Comments, suggestions, etc. are welcome.

Thanks again

Brian

PS I should add that we made use of a blended approach during the talk, as
Adrian Stephenson, University of Manchester, listened in to (and watched)
our talk using Skype whilst on holiday in a WiFi-enabled camp site in the
Lake District!

---------------------------------------
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath
BATH
BA2 7AY
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
Phone: 01225 383943
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For info on FOAF see http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/b.kelly/foaf/