By Bill Ashworth

So you've put up a web page and taken care to make it eye-catching, informative and accurate. Have you also made it accessible to the customers you want to reach? Specifically, have you considered whether or not a disabled person who might be interested in your product or service could access the page?

This may be of more than academic interest. As the web grows, so does the legal expectation that the services it provides will be available to everyone. If your company or agency falls under the purview of the Americans with Disabilities Act, your web page may be required to meet accessibility criteria.

Fortunately, help is available from the web itself. There are a number of web sites dedicated to improving access to technology for disabled persons. This article highlights two of the better ones: DO-IT and CAST.

DO-IT
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~doit stands for Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology. Mounted by an organization called "DO-IT at the University of Washington," the site contains numerous cross-linked pages, all well-organized, dealing with connecting disabled people to educational technology, to business technology, and to the Internet. A document posted on the site, "World Wide Access: accessible Web Design," includes many hints for designing web pages so they can be accessed by the specialized browsers which disabled people must use. Some of these hints also make understanding a site easier for the slightly disabled, who may be using normal browsers but who may have problems with particular features of a page.

CAST
http://www.cast.org is a project of the Center for Applied Special Technology in Peabody, Massachusetts. The site is primarily devoted to describing the Center's programs and projects and those of its associated Universal Design Laboratory, but it also contains an interesting resource known as "Bobby." This page
http://udl.cast.org/bobby/ is a universal-access web page tester. The user enters the URL of the page he or she wishes to test and chooses, from a list, the name of particular browser to test the page's capabilities against. "Bobby" will load the page, examine it, and display a copy of it with annotations noting the difficulties users of the named browser are likely to experience with the page. It also provides a rating of from one to four stars: four stars sites are invited to mark themselves "Bobby Approved," and there is a link that will install the Bobby-Approved symbol directly onto qualifying pages.

What makes a four star site? Here are some hints, provided by Paula Palmer of DO-IT:

• Think redundancy. The more ways you can identify something on your site, the more likely a variety of browsers will be able to pick it up. Always include descriptive tags with graphics, either as captions or a ALT tags in the HTML script. Caption video and transcribe audio as graphical maps.