Awareness of the Web accessibility is spreading all over the world among Web designers and developers, due to regulations and various guidelines, such as the US law called Section 508 and W3C WCAG. We now see various Web accessibility adaptations on the Web. For example, we see increasing use of alternative texts for images and skip-navigation links for speed.
However, we sometimes find inappropriate ALT texts and broken skip-navigation links, even though they are present. These pages may be compliant, but they are not accessible or really usable. We analyzed such problems and found that some sites only try to comply with regulations and guidelines, but without understanding the needs underlying Web accessibility. We concluded that Web designers and developers should experience the real problems faced by people with disabilities so they can create truly accessible and usable pages. There was no practical way for them to experience disabilities.
In this paper, we first discuss how much and how well the Web accessibility has progressed by analyzing real world improvements to existing sites.
We then describe why the "disability experience" helps give a better understanding of the Web accessibility guidelines and regulations. Some tools like Home Page Reader and aDesigner are available to let designers experience blind users' usability. Finally, we consider how visually attractive sites can also be made more accessible.

The Web is providing unprecedented access to information for people with disabilities. However, we have much work to do: the majority of existing Web content is not fully accessible; browsers, multimedia players and assistive technologies do not yet provide a completely usable and accessible experience; and authoring tools and development environments (including content managements systems such as blogging applications) do not produce fully accessible Web content and do not have accessible interfaces. Until people with disabilities are able to both access and contribute to the Web, the Web is not accessible.
This presentation will show how Web accessibility depends on several components of Web development and interaction working together. It will also demonstrate the essential relationship between the WAI guidelines: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG), and User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG). Engineering accessible design requires all of these pieces to be operating together.

In the past few years, Web design has experienced something of a renaissance as designers focus more than ever on using semantic markup and pushing CSS to its practical limits. Since this rebirth got underway, it has had concern for accessibility as an integral component. All the pieces are in place to bring forth the Web as it was always meant to be - or are they? Eric takes a hard look at the accessibility of current design techniques and evaluates the state of visually compelling design's accessibility, both now and in the near future.