Proceedings Now Available for Web Accessibility Capacity Building Institute

January 26, 2007 - Proceedings are now available for the Web Accessibility Capacity Building Institute (CBI), held November 29 - December 1, 2006 in Seattle. The CBI was funded by the National Science Foundation (cooperative agreement #0227995) through the Northwest Alliance for Access to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (AccessSTEM), which is directed by DO-IT at the University of Washington. The purpose of the CBI was to identify accessibility problems and solutions related to emerging web applications and the technologies used to create them, as well as to identify strategies that lead to systemic change within higher education.

The ultimate goal of AccessSTEM is to increase the successful participation of people with disabilities in STEM careers. To reach this goal, it is critical that students with disabilities have full access to the software and information used in their educational programs. Higher education institutions are exploring and beginning to utilize rich media technologies to improve functionality and usability of both academic and administrative web services, but by doing so they may risk excluding students and employees with disabilities. It is critical that accessibility be addressed early in the development and deployment of web applications, including those that utilize emerging technologies such as AJAX, Adobe Flex, and Adobe Flash.

Participants at the CBI included representatives from the World Wide Consortium (W3C), IBM, Google, Yahoo, Adobe, and GW Micro, as well as 27 web managers and programmers from 11 colleges and universities, primarily from the Northwest region of the United States.

The full proceedings, including a comprehensive summary of CBI presentations and discussions, is available online: http://www.washington.edu/doit/cbi/webaccess/proceedings.html