What is Web Standards and what it means to me?

Web standards is really about the different formats and usability options of designing a web page. This was an area I was not aware of and I'm sure many people are not aware of. In my four years of college I have accessed the web on a daily basis with no difficulities and have even set up web pages without taking web standards into account. Those of us who have no difficulty with  poor eyesight or other disabilities have no problem using the web on a daily basis. But we sometimes fail to think of the 10 - 20% population that have disabilities. 10% of males have some form of colour blindness. This fact alone really made me open my eyes to the problems of accessining the web. 

What is web standards? 
Web Standards are in place to ensure everyone has easy access to the information on the web and it also makes web development faster and more enjoyable. Web standards makes it easier for people with special needs to use the web. Blind people may have their computer read web pages to them.

People with poor eyesight may have pages rearranged and magnified for easier reading.
And people using hand-held devices can browse the web just as easily as those using high end workstations. 

 W3C and web standards

A man by the name of Sir Tim Berners-Lee a British physicist and computer scientists and MIT professor credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989, also founder of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994. This consortium is an international industry dedicated to leading the web to its full potential. W3C has more than 450 member organisations some big name companies such as: Microsoft, American Online, Adobe and many many more. The W3C is the main international standards organisation for the  World Wide Web. W3C continues to expand the reach of the web for everyone regardless of culture or abilities. Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee and W3C they have made the web more user friendly and accesiable for people with disabilities.

This is a link to the W3C web standards page.


Accessibility is a legal requirement: Disability Discrimination Act 1992

The following is a case where Maguire made a complaint to the human rights and equal opportunity commission, alleging that SOCOG had discriminated against him on the grounds of disability, in contravention of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 in three aspects: the failure to provide braille copies of the information required to place orders for Olympic Games tickets; the failure to provide braille copies of the Olympic Games souvener programme; and the failure to provide a web site which was accessible to Maguire.

Maguire v SOCOG

As you can see from the above information web standards are now becoming very important. If your web site is not up to scratch with the correct requirements you are breaching the Disability Discrimination Act of 1992. Now that I have studied about web standrads I intend to look at every website I use and see how user friendly they are and if they match Sir Tim Beners-Lee standrads.