Print
 |
Background
Use of the Web is spreading rapidly into most areas of society and daily life. In many countries, the Web is increasingly used for government information and services, education and training, commerce, workplace interaction, civic participation, health care, entertainment, and a lot more. In some cases, the Web is replacing traditional resources. Therefore, it is essential that the Web be accessible in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities.
In Germany governmental institutions are committed to develop their websites with a barrier free (handicapped accessible) webdesign - adapted to the rules of the W3C and the German law (BITV). Further on also the websites of the municipalities shall become barrier free. Local administrators who are usually responsible for the websites of their community are simply overstrained with the design of accessible websites because webdesign is just a secondary task. It lacks time dealing with such a complex issue. The municipality of Osterholz and the ProArbeit identified this as a problem. This went along with the upcoming redesign of the ProArbeit Website. The ProArbeit website should become a sort of role model. The previous website of ProArbeit ran with an old software which was neither user friendly nor barrier free. But there was a second problem. By considering other websites of the county of Osterholz most of them were neither user friendly nor barrier free. Not at last the result was a very low attendance. The usability and accessibility seemed to be the main problems. Both of them are not only similar, they also have a common intersection. Optimized websites can run on multiple devices e.g. Web TV and Palm Pilots they can be used on multiple operating systems like Windows, MacOS and Linux derivates. They can be accessed through different browsers Netscape and Explorer and are working on old as well as new web browsers. This also results in considerably extending access and reducing barriers to disabled Internet users who will be accessing the World Wide Web through a range of special devices such as speech synthesisers and Braille readers. With the help of technical support by the partners and financial support from the EU under the ICOIN project, the municipality of Osterholz was able to face the problems and to design adequate solutions. The problem turned into a challenge.  |
Publisher Christian Bonfré Updated: 2008-04-10 |