Endorsed by the White House, the IPO is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, the European Commission's TIDE Programme, and W3C industry members. Systems developed to aid people with disabilities may help able-bodied people too. Research into speech recognition and synthesis, automatic translation software, alternative interfaces with computers, and new approaches to representing, transmitting and storing information can have countless applications. Telematics is part of the IV Framework Programme of the European Community for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration activities. We will continue to push the envelope that leads to technology advancements on behalf of people with disabilities and commend the W3C for its continued leadership role.
Software designed for accessibility makes good business sense.
The WAI has already has several active working groups and expects to announce progress on the technical side before the end of the year. According to Daniel Dardailler, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Project Manager, the WAI technical working group has reviewed the format and protocol elements within the HTML 4.0 specification, and will be delivering their feedback to the W3C HTML Working Group in the very near future. The new IPO will be an excellent source for raising of awareness and for educating all web companies and supporters as to the need for greater access for all people. For this last group, the time is right now to deal with issues of audio on the web since we are still early in that development. This is important because the band aid approach that has been used in the past has resulted in unnecessary work for web designers and inadequate access by many web users.