Web Accessibility 3.0: Learning From The Past, Planning For The Future

In this paper the authors think afresh about the problems of social inclusion and argue that "Web accessibility 3.0" must be very different from the WAI WCAG 1.0 and holistic accessibility approaches if it is ever to be effective. The paper provides a critical reappraisal of the limitations of the WAI approach to Web accessibility, arguing that its political successes have failed to be supporting by the development of practical, achievable and future-proofed guidelines for Web authors. The paper goes on to question whether the holistic approach to Web accessibility, which seeks to make use of WCAG guidelines in a pragmatic fashion, which acknowledges the importance of the context of use, the resource implications and the requirements to support a wide range of requirements beyond accessibility, provides a scalable approach which is capable of addressing accessibility in a Web 2.0 environment, in which many users exploit services which are no longer managed within the institution. An alternative approach to Web accessibility is described which seeks to exploit the scale of the Web. The approach, which has been labelled Accessibility 3.0, has parallels with the ideas surrounding 'Web 3.0' which seeks to build on the rich interactivity provided by Web 2.0 with deeper exploitation of the relationships between resources using Semantic Web approaches. The paper concludes by revisiting the lessons learnt over the decade in the approaches taken to seeking to enhance the accessibility of Web resources and argues the need to adopt a critical approach to the alternative approaches described in this paper.