Web pages for the disabled got the suport of the White House, W3C and others.

Wheelchair accessible web pages. Making the Internet

usable for the disables got the support of the White House,

W3C, and other computer vendors.

   Ray Van Eng (05/10/97)

With the sponsorship of the White House, the Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) was announced to promote the development of technologies to extend the usability of the world wide web medium to people with disabilities.

According to Tim Berners-Lee, director of the W3C, "worldwide, there are more than 750 million people with disabilities." and "the W3C is committed to removing accessibility barriers for people with disabilities including the deaf, blind, physically challenged, and cognitive or visually impaired."

U.S. President Clinton indicated that the Department of Education will provide funding for the WAI and his administration will fully support this innovative program.

Charter sponsors include IBM, Lotus, Microsoft, Riverland Holding, and SoftQuad International.

The Toronto, Canada based SoftQuad International, offered a software publishing tool called the SoftQuad AdaptAbility Toolkit that would allow a web site developer to give the disabled full access to the web using an on-screen keyboard for inputing text, selecting commands etc. , a screen magnifier for easy visibility and a screen reader for reading URLs, headers, text and so on.

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