Rick Ellis -Washington State

Much better! “Our job is to support mountain climbers”, he begins, a huge slide of Mt. Rainier behind him. Mt climbers? Yes, in a way I can see his metaphor. Getting resources on the web can often seem like a daunting task for our faculty and staff. We are the Sherpas to aid them and choose the tools to make sure that their message reaches all students.

Slowly, Rick begins to talk about the history of accessibility and describes what he refers to as the 1.0 and 2.0 versions of web accessibility. At the start, HTML was created only to convey the structure of the content, not the presentation. This was the only way to ensure that any single page could be displayed on different devices, browsers and screen readers. Then the browser wars messed that all up…