Columns - Internet Trends

What to do when the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Impacts Case Settlements:
The Benefits of an Accessibility-Focused Case Evaluation

A White Paper by Michael Fiore

One of the likely unintended consequences of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is that Special Need Trusts (SNT’s) may be impacted due to settlement criteria that can be based on past, present, and future medical needs.

Read the White Paper

Teleseminars on Disability, Diversity, and the Changing Workforce. One hour of learning that can change the way that you think.

Tech Update: Read an article about the implications of 32-bit and 64-bit processors for Assistive Technology Solutions.

Looking for qualified candidates with disabilities?

recruitdisability.org
A Job Board for job seekers with disabilities and the businesses looking to hire them.

Web Standards: An Introduction

Valid CSS!

Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional

508 UsableNet Approved (v. 2.1)

You may be asking yourself, "what do the above icons mean?" They indicate that the website meets certain Web standards for design and accessibility. Alas, you ask, "what are web standards?"

In order to answer that question. properly, we need to go back to the early 1990s. As the World Wide Web and specifically the Internet, have evolved, there became a need to establish a set of web standards. The software and hardware often were proprietary and users were receiving different results in their Web surfing, depending on the software and hardware that they used. In 1994, the Tim Berners-Lee and others created the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international consortium to develop Web standards and protocols.

Since 1994, industry manufacturers and developers have been slow to adopt the standards and guidelines, and to this day, there are still many incompatibilities, especially in browsers, assistive technology and software, which causes problems for website developers. Some modern browsers like Mozilla Firefox are standards compliant, while different versions of Internet Explorer are not. This causes Web designers to have to implement "workarounds" or "hacks" in their code to make your Web pages display and work properly in the different browsers.

Of interest to web designers, are the web design standards dealing with accessibility, hypertext markup language (HTML) and other web programming languages, and cascading style sheets (CSS), which allows for the separation of content and styling.

In future articles, I will explore Web standards further and how they help or hinder Web designers and users. Please direct questions to Eliot Spindel

Read the Internet Trends archives.


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