A Common Approach to Accessibility for All From: IST Results - 06/12/2006 Information Society Technologies (IST) is funding an initiative to develop a practical and common method for benchmarking and evaluating the accessibility of Web sites. The project is the work of the EU Web Accessibility Benchmarking (WAB) Cluster at the Bartimeus Accessibility Foundation in the Netherlands, and three other IST projects. The European Internet Accessibility Observatory (EIAO) project is developing a prototype for widescale Web accessibility benchmarking, while Support EAM is pushing the European Commission and its member states to embrace the "eAccessibility" quality mark for goods and services, which would bring the region in line with the standards developed within the WAB cluster and accepted internationally by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). BenToWeb (Benchmarking Tools and Methods for the Web) will offer new software modules and methodologies for Web accessibility that address such factors as color contrast, low vision, color deficiency, consistency of navigation elements, and language simplicity. Ultimately, researchers are trying to determine the best way to design and evaluate an accessible site, and develop standards and guidelines that can work for the entire region. The WAB cluster is expected to unveil the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology (UWEM) 1.0 in July online for free, and it will be consistent with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines developed by W3C. Project coordinator Eric Velleman says Web accessibility impacts everyone, adding that adopting W3C's guidelines will make a Web site easy to read in screen readers, PDAs, mobile phones as a result. Read the entire article at: http://istresults.cordis.lu/index.cfm/section/news/tpl/article/BrowsingType/Features/ID/82339 Links: IST Results http://istresults.cordis.lu/ ISTweb http://cordis.europa.eu/ist/ Web Accessibility Benchmarking http://www.wabcluster.org/ European Internet Accessibility Observatory http://eiao.net/ Support EAM http://www.support-eam.org/ Benchmarking Tools and Methods for the Web http://bentoweb.org/ Eric Velleman http://www.braillenet.org/colloques/policies/velleman_paper.html