‘Social Aspects of Internet Development’ was a conference held on December 7th 1999 at Dublin Castle. The conference presented findings of research on present usage of the internet in Ireland and discussed measures which, given the growing importance of the internet as a means of communication and commerce, would ensure that access to this medium would be just and equal.
The workshop ‘Universal Design in Website Development’ took building-in accessibility to websites at the design and development stage as its theme. It offered practical advice to website developers on how to ensure the maximum accessibility and inclusion of all users. The workshop was given by Alexis Donnelly, Department of Computer Science, TCD. Alexis has been responsible for the development of the AHEAD website (www.ahead.ie). The following resources were compiled by Alexis and were circulated as supporting material at the workshop.
"Cascading Style Sheets, Level 2" available at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/ (see the World Wide Web Consortium's website for further information on style sheets at http://www.w3.org/Style/).
"Web Pages That Suck: Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad Design” by Vincent Flanders & Michael Willis, Sybex, 1997, ISBN: 0-7821-2187-X see also http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/
"The HTML Stylesheet Sourcebook", Ian S. Graham, Wiley 1997, ISBN 0-471-19664-9
"Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity" by Jakob Neilsen, New Riders, 1999, ISBN: 156205810X, see http://www.useit.com/jakob/webusability/
The DocBook Architecture is described in Chapter 2 (pages 54-62) of "Structuring XML Documents" by D. Megginson, Prentice Hall, 1998, ISBN: 0-13-642299-3.
"Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" by Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville, O'Reilly Associates, February 1998, ISBN 1-56592-282-4,
"Weaving the Web", Tim Berners-Lee, Orion Business Press, November 1999, ISBN: 0752820907
WAI Guidelines http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/
AWARE (Accessible Web Authoring Resources and Education) http://aware.hwg.org/
Draft Curriculum on WAI Content Guidelines http://www.starlingweb.com/wai/wcag/
Canadian Govt http://www.canada.gc.ca/programs/guide/3_1_4e.html
http://www.ca.gov/access/howtoweb.html
GSA CITA http://www.itpolicy.gsa.gov/cita/
Starling Access Services http://www.starlingweb.com/webac.htm
Trace Research & Development Center http://www.trace.wisc.edu/
Bobby Accessibility Checker http://www.cast.org/bobby
WebLint Gateway http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/
W3C HTML Validator http://validator.w3.org
Lynx Pre-Viewer http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html
Collection of Useful Web Evaluation Tools http://www.cgu.edu/degrade/evaluators.html
Adobe's PDF-to-HTML Converter http://access.adobe.com/simple_form.html
HotMetal Pro from SoftQuad http://www.hotmetalpro.com and http://www.softquad.com
Browser support for HTML 4.0 & Cascading Style Sheets http://www.ora.com/catalog/html3
City of San Jose (an example of good practice) http://www.ci.san-jose.ca.us/oaacc/disacces.html
Accessible Versions of Common Search Engines http://www.seti-search.com
Second Generation Search Engine (also accessible) http://www.google.com
Alexis Donnelly, Department of Computer Science, O'Reilly Institute, Trinity College, Dublin 2. E-mail: Alexis.Donnelly@cs.tcd.ie
Further guidelines by Alexis Donnelly are available at the AHEAD website and HEEU Newsletter 7 ‘Untangling the Web’.