Development of Web Accessibility Guidelines and related tools

[[abstract]]The international standard, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0), was defined by W3C/WAI in 1999. Later, Taiwan government, based on the Disabled Persons Protection Act, defined Taiwan Web Accessibility Guideline (TWAG), which is now available for the promotion of web accessibility in Taiwan. In this article, we discuss and compare the design principles of TWAG and WCAG. In order to handle the web accessibility issues according to TWAG, the tools of web accessibility check engine and web accessibility builder are designed and implemented. In the web accessibility check engine, we use XML-based check rules to implement the 90 check codes regulated in TWAG. By using XML-based web page templates, the web accessibility builder can generate homepages that meet with the web accessibility requirements from TWAG. Besides, voice synthesis components are included in our web accessibility builder. It can synthesize voice for the web pages. This feature provides audio access of the web page for the disabled, in particular, for the visual impaired.