I was really excited to see that WebAIM, in partnership with the National Center on Disability and Access to Education, has received funding to help web developers consider issues of cognitive disability in their designs. The Phase I Steppingstones of Technology Innovation grant, awarded by the US Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), is a two-year development grant with a focus on producing a tool intended to help Web developers create web content that can more readily be used by those with cognitive and learning disabilities.
This is great news and something that is very much needed. When the draft version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) was published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) last year it drew a lot of comment from the accessibility and web design community. One re-occurring comment was that it failed to address the needs of people with cognitive impairments satisfactorily and that this group was in danger of being left behind. Specifically it was flagged that the testability of the success criteria that address cognitive impairments were insufficient.
With the most recent draft release of WCAG 2.0 the Working Group provided some explanation of how they have taken on board and addressed accessibility for users with cognitive impairments but for me the fact that this was such an issue served only to highlight that we, in the web design community, need a lot more research done in this area.
The Steppingstones Project with look at developing a set of evaluation rules and algorithms to be added to the WebAIM’s WAVE evaluation tools. The intent of the new functionality is to provide developers with feedback on how their web page designs might impact users with cognitive or learning disabilities.
Find out more about the Steppingstones Project on Web Accessibility and Cognitive Disabilities in Education.
Karen Lynn | 01/08/2007 at 16:54 | Permalink
This is Wonderful!
My name is Karen, and I not only have C.P. but a learning Disability. I think this is GREAT news! That will make life so much eaiser for so many of us! Please come and visit me, I’d love to hear and share on my site some of the other things you have accomplished. I’ll be looking forward to that:>)
Henny | 01/08/2007 at 21:57 | Permalink
Yes it’s great news Karen. WebAIM are a great bunch so I expect there’ll be some really good research and tool some out of it. Liked your blog by the way.