The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
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.

Soon thereafter, working groups were formed to draft the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG). User agents, in this context, are web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Camino, and Lynx. These guidelines ensure that the browsers will be able to render web content in a way that is accessible to people with disabilities.

Another important set of guidelines is the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG). These guidelines explain how to make authoring tools such as Dreamweaver, FrontPage, GoLive, etc. accessible to people with disabilities, and how to make sure that they produce accessible content.

The WAI has helped to raise awareness of the need for accessibility on the web, and its guidelines have formed the basis for laws in countries all over the world. As the WAI home page declares:

"The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."
– Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web
(see W3C - external link)