Making the Web More Accessible to People with Disabilities and Special Needs
From: AlphaGalileo - 02/25/2011

A paper by University of Szeged (Hungary) researchers published in the
International Journal of Knowledge and Web Intelligence suggests theoretical
and practical methods of employing metadata and screen and data structure to
facilitate universal Internet accessibility. Szeged's Erzsebet Forczek says
that access to the Internet and the retrieval and processing of Web-based
information is essential for all members of society. "For information to
become global, it is not sufficient merely for it to appear on the Web; it
has to be searchable, and its contents identifiable and interpretable, since
immediately available information is crucial in economic and business life,
in education, in research, in health care, and in virtually every other
sphere of life," Forczek says. The researchers are focusing on how the needs
of those with visual and hearing impairments are addressed by Web sites.
Forczek says that Web designers should aim for a syntactically and
semantically correct Web page that is compatible with assistive software, and
should correctly use metadata to make the information more readily available
through searches. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=96968&CultureCode=en
http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news-making-the-web-more-accessible-to-people-with-disa-022511.aspx

Link:
Metadata and information structure design on websites – towards a web for all (abstract)
http://www.inderscience.com/search/index.php?action=record&rec_id=38625&prevQuery=&ps=10&m=or