A Word from the Director

The Internet

The Internet represents a mind-boggling array of informational and entertainment sites. Many people have expressed the feeling that the Internet and its ever-changing World Wide Web (WWW) of resources, is THE way in which all people of the future will communicate, buy groceries, pay bills, and publish their new novels.If the present is of any assistance in predicting the future, however, we should be cautious in reaching such sweeping conclusions. Periodical publishers, such as Newsweek, for example, have learned that its readers do not expect or want a WWW reproduction of a readily-available paper version of their periodicals. Instead, readers expect and want Internet sites to contain new and different information that is considered to be more timely, more focused, and more relevant to personal interests.

The Internet should not be viewed as an electronic form of what has already been produced on paper. If this is the scenario under which your WWW site is developed, you will miss the richness of the Internet. Internet sites are fellow members of an astounding network of related resources. Information you include in your Internet site should benefit from these resources by building links or connections with relevant information that is located elsewhere. Your site should not reproduce information that is available elsewhere but rather link to it within the context of your unique information. These types of connections expand the value of your information rather than detract from it.

The richness of your Internet site can also be expanded through the use of graphics and related illustrative material. The inclusion of this material may, however, cause accessibility problems for people that have programmed their browsers to orally read HTML text, for example. No readers available today can "read" a photograph, an animated illustration, or even, many times, an ordinary-looking table of data.

Special care is required to make sure that everything included in your site has something to communicate. Once this is accomplished, your site should be able to communicate its information in several ways at the same time -- for example, you should offer a text description of a pie chart of data. Accessibility of your site's information does not automatically occur when using the Internet. Your site must be constructed to afford maximal accessibility to all "viewers" including those with disabilities that may use special equipment or computer configurations to assist them in achieving access.

Lastly, I must say that ways to maximize the "communication power" of your Internet site and maintain maximum accessibility for all viewers is, at best, fuzzy. For example, the NCDDR was recently contacted by an Internet site developer that wanted to make his site easier to read by people with low vision by creating the site's information in large, capital print in bold type. This design actually complicated the ability of people with low vision and those using special browser and reader configurations to access his site's information.

Almost half of the current NIDRR grantees have sites on the WWW. If you maintain such a site, you should assume that it serves as a model to others interested in learning about and/or creating an accessible Internet site. This issue of The Research Exchange is designed to help you in meeting this accessibility challenge.

John D. Westbrook, Ph.D.
Director, NCDDR

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