Bridging websites ? on the way to accessible websites
Pataki Máté <>
W3C Magyar Iroda
The W3C Hungary Office aims to get interested people acquainted with the hottest Web technologies, standards and the newest W3C developments. Fortunately, besides the popular W3C standards (HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML), numerous, less spread standards are becoming more and more used and well known nowadays.
One of the respective fields is accessibility, which is getting more and more visibility not only in the media but in the professional sphere as well. W3C published WCAG 1.0 in 1999, which has been further elaborated and refined. The result is WCAG 2.0 published in December 2008, which is already available in Hungarian on the W3C Hungary Office website. So far this is the first and only translation of the WCAG 2.0 Guideline.
Accessibility checking and testing of websites require professional background and knowledge, and not all companies or institutions can afford to contract staff for it. The W3C Hungary Office has launched a new service which will cover this work, not only by easing accessibility testing and checking but it helps to visualize that a given site/webpage is valid, accessible and clearly indicates its level of accessibility. This is very important for the visitors of the sites, since they can be sure that they would not meet any barriers that would prevent them to access content there.