‘Accessibility 2.0: Next Steps For Web Accessibility

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) was established to enhance the accessibility of Web resources for people with disabilities. In this paper we argue that although WAI’s advocacy work has been very successful, the WAI approach is flawed. Rather than WAI’s emphasis on adoption of technical guidelines, the authors argue that the priority should be for a user-focussed approach, which embeds best practices through the development of achievable policies and processes and which includes all stakeholders in the process of maximising accessibility. The paper describes a tangram model which provides a pluralistic approach to Web accessibility, and provides case studies which illustrate use of this approach. The paper describes work which has informed the ideas in this paper and plans for further work, including an approach to advocacy and education which coins the “Accessibility 2.0” term to describe a renewed approach to accessibility, which builds on previous work but prioritises the importance of the user.