Introduction to the Web Accessibility Initiative

In a sense, nobody is in charge of the web. The web is an open standard, with no restrictions on who can post content, or what that content should be about. The web belongs to everybody, and so it belongs to nobody. The openness and decentralization of the web is one of its greatest strengths. But it wouldn’t work at all without some sort of standard way of encoding the information. That’s where the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) comes in.

The W3C is an international, vendor-neutral group that determines the protocols and standards for the web. They invented HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, SMIL, SVG, and a host of other acronyms that stand for different kinds of markup languages. Most people have at least heard of HTML (HyperText Markup Language). All basic web documents are written in HTML (or XHTML—or eXtensible HyperText Markup Language—which is a modified, XML-based version of HTML).

As the web matured, the members of the W3C realized that they needed to make provisions to ensure that people with disabilities were not excluded from accessing it. From this realization, the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) was born. The WAI formed a working group to draft some guidelines for ensuring disability access to Web content. These guidelines are known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG.

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