Web Accessibility - A timely recognized challenge

Abstract: Web Accessibility for disabled people has posed a challenge to the civilized societies that claim to uphold the principles of equal opportunity and nondiscrimination. Certain concrete measures have been taken to narrow down the digital divide between normal and disabled users of Internet technology. The efforts have resulted in enactment of legislations and laws and mass awareness about the discriminatory nature of the accessibility issue, besides the efforts have resulted in the development of commensurate technological tools to develop and test the Web accessibility. World Wide Web consortium's (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has framed a comprehensive document comprising of set of guidelines to make the Web sites accessible to the users with disabilities. This paper is about the issues and aspects surrounding Web Accessibility. The details and scope are kept limited to comply with the aim of the paper which is to create awareness and to provide basis for in-depth investigation.