Buy essay on Web accessibility

There are millions people with disabilities: blind, deaf people, people with physical activity problems. Information technologies and the Internet give a new chance to people with disabilities. Especially young people are suffered, because they understand all advantages of the information technologies, but they meet a lot of obstacles on the way of their usage. Without access to the information technologies, persons with disabilities are at a significant disadvantage. Thus, since the learning process increasingly relies on information technology, lack of opportunities to access the Internet is becoming one of the factors limiting the potential of disabled persons in the field of education. The Internet resource should be properly equipped to give the blind user a chance to read and understand its content. But many websites remain inaccessible to the blind and visually impaired. A recent study published by the «Financial Times» stock index FTSE-100 for the United Kingdom showed that around three-quarters of the Web sites of companies, belonging to the correspondent group, do not provide a basic level of accessibility. Neglecting the availability of their Web sites, companies of the United Kingdom fail to profit of 80 billion pounds.
What is the web accessibility?
Web accessibility means that people with disables can use the Web. More specifically, web accessibility means that people with disables can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web. Web accessibility encompasses all disabilities that affect access to the Web, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities. Here are some examples of health problems, which can affect access to the Internet:
• Some people can’t use their arms to use the mouse. Such person can use a mouth stick, which is just a wooden dowel with an eraser on the end
• Some people with tremors and old people with diminishing fine motor control can use a keyboard, but not a mouth.
• Some people can’t see so use the screen-readers to understand what is on the display.
• Some people have blurry vision and can’t read text unless it is very large, so they need a browser where they will be able to increase the size of the text and images. (Thatcher, et al., 2006)
What resources should be adapted in the first place?
• Mass media
• The systems of distance learning and educational portals.
• Sites of the governmental authorities
• Important Internet-services such as Internet-banks.
There is special software, which reads the information from the screen aloud (text-to speech programs) or reproduce it through the tactile sensation (a refreshable Braille display). Screen-readers are more popular because of their low cost. One of the most popular screen-reader is JAWS by Freedom Scientific.
The advantages of the adapted web-sites
• Internet users with disabilities have access to the Internet resources, which means new customers.
• It increases the convenience of use also for the normal users.
• Better compatibility with the web search engines.
• Improves manageability of the Internet resources through standardization.
• Protection of investments in Internet resources
• Compliance with the constitutional rights of the citizens
Among the main problems faced by disabled people on the Internet can be called “no alternative” graphical information that can not be revealed by the screen reader, such as protection system from automatic registration (CAPTCHA); congestion of pages site by elements, which do not carry a substantial content – banners, flash-video, etc.; unnecessarily complicated and often wrong HTML-code of web pages, which causes difficulties in navigating the Web sites and pages using programs to read from the screen.