Introduction
Accessibility and Web 2.0 are more than two hyped words that give a presence on the internet; they are important changes to the way in which the internet is used and who can obtain access to it.
“Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web. Web accessibility also benefits others, including older people with changing abilities due to aging.” (W3C, 2005).
A number of the new technologies that support the term web 2.0 use large amounts of client side scripting to produce an improved interface for an able bodied user. This has a detrimental affect on the users who cannot interact with the dynamic content that is being incorporated into modern web design. In particular web users relying on screen readers to convey information find dynamic content hard to interact with.
Previously to the explosion of dynamic and multimedia based content on the internet, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created web standards for the internet. These are aimed at helping all people get access to the internet and to standardise the coding behind it. Now new ideas alongside the standardising of ECMA Script have enabled more developers to build in useful functionality that was previously impossible. When the aim of the added functionality is to provide a more useful interface it is also important to look at the affect on users who find the new methods hard to understand. This is due to the use of third party software or different input devices.
Throughout this report I aim to highlight the balance between usability and accessibility looking at what web 2.0 is. Also how they will affect the future way in which we use the internet. There is strong evidence that some of the techniques associated with the Web 2.0 terminology increase the accessibility to the majority of users. AJAX is a new method of using existing technology that is widely associated with Web 2.0. As part of the exploration into the implementation of AJAX I plan to investigate system designs that give all users access to information that the majority of users would gain through AJAX. AJAX relies on JavaScript which most accessible websites try to avoid. They avoid it because it is generally inaccessible to third party software that aids a disabled user.
As the internet based industries are under pressure form legal legislation to make their services accessible there is a need to make all new technologies accessible. At the moment a large amount of disadvantaged users rely on third party software to relay information from the screen in a format they can understand. I will look at how this software works on several sites that use AJAX and heavy amounts of client side scripting to assess the possibilities of my own examples throughout the tutorial website that accompanies this report.